In Defense of the Red Army

[VCDR]

Well said castlebravo92.

The USSR as a 'victim' of Western machinations is a deeply flawed reading of history, ignoring both the systemic failures of the Soviet system and the agency of the Eastern Bloc nations that sought to escape its grip.

1) The USSR's Internal Failures Were the Primary Cause of Collapse

Economic Mismanagement: The Soviet Union's centrally planned economy was inefficient and increasingly unable to compete with the market-driven economies of the West. By the 1980s, systemic shortages of consumer goods, food, and energy were widespread. Remember when главный противник exported over 150 million tons of grain to the USSR between 1960 and 1991 Pepperidge farms remembers...

Technological Stagnation: While the USSR maintained a strong military-industrial complex, it lagged in consumer technology and innovation. The focus on military production came at the expense of quality-of-life improvements for its citizens.

Political Corruption: The bloated and inefficient bureaucracy, rife with nepotism and corruption, alienated ordinary Soviet citizens and undermined faith in the system.

Lack of Incentives: The absence of economic incentives in the planned economy stifled productivity and innovation. This was compounded by an ideological rigidity that resisted necessary reforms until it was too late.

2) The USSR Was Far from Innocent

The Soviet Union aggressively sought to destabilize Western nations through espionage, propaganda, and covert operations. From funding Communist movements worldwide to attempting to influence elections in democratic countries, the USSR was no passive player.

The Warsaw Pact invasions of Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, and Afghanistan in 1979 showcase the USSR's willingness to crush dissent through military force. Claiming victimhood ignores its role as an oppressive imperial power.

3) The Role of the West Was Overstated

While the West certainly opposed the USSR, attributing its collapse to Western interference ignores the Soviets' own systemic failures. The CIA's role in covert operations often had mixed results; successes were rare, and failures (e.g., the Bay of Pigs) were numerous.

The USSR's collapse was largely a result of internal dissent. Gorbachev's reforms (Perestroika and Glasnost) attempted to modernize the USSR but instead exposed its vulnerabilities. The Eastern Bloc countries, tired of Soviet domination, chose to break free when the opportunity arose.

4) The "Oligarchs" Were a Consequence of the Soviet Collapse, Not the Cause

The rise of oligarchs and criminals during the post-Soviet transition was a symptom of the chaotic dismantling of the centrally planned economy. The USSR's lack of a legal framework for privatization and property rights created a power vacuum, which opportunistic individuals exploited.

Suggesting that these individuals were foreign intelligence agents is speculative and aligns with modern Russian propaganda narratives, not historical evidence.

5) The USSR's Collapse Was Inevitable.

A comparison with Western systems shows why the USSR's collapse was predictable:

Economic Scale: The Soviet GDP at its peak was dwarfed by the combined GDPs of NATO countries, and its growth stagnated while Western economies grew.

Freedom of Expression: The lack of political freedoms in the USSR stifled dissent temporarily but created a pressure cooker that eventually exploded during Glasnost.

Popular Rebellion: The Eastern Bloc revolutions in the late 1980s, from Poland's Solidarity movement to the fall of the Berlin Wall, were driven by the people, not Western spies.

6) Russian Literature Post-2000 Is Propaganda-Laden

Post 2000 "Russian literature" reflects the narratives promoted by Vladimir Putin's government, which seeks to paint Russia as a perennial victim of Western aggression. This literature often ignores the USSR's culpability in its collapse and the genuine aspirations of the people in Eastern Europe for freedom and democracy.

TL;DR:

The Soviet Union was not a victim; it was an aggressor and an empire that collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions. Attempts to frame its demise as a purely Western plot are both ahistorical and and dismissive of the agency of millions of people who rejected its oppressive system.

[Raellus]

I wonder if the Soviet Union could have survived, or even thrived, had it instituted Chinese-style economic reforms starting in the early-to-mid 1980s- Perestroika without Glasnost, if you will. It worked pretty well for the PRC, and the Chinese started with a more backward economy.

This might be the most realistic explanation for an extant, strong USSR in a T2k timeline.

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[kato13]

I wonder if the Soviet Union could have survived, or even thrived, had it instituted Chinese-style economic reforms starting in the early-to-mid 1980s....

This might be the most realistic explanation for an extant, strong USSR in a T2k timeline.

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IMHO lots of things work against this.

Too few ports, too many borders, too many ethnicities, too paranoid, too confrontational, too proud, too isolationist, too expensive for foreign manufacturing, and too corrupt (Which compared to China is saying something).

[Raellus]

IMHO lots of things work against this.

Too few ports, too many borders, too many ethnicities, too paranoid, too confrontational, too proud, too isolationist, too expensive for foreign manufacturing, and too corrupt (Which compared to China is saying something).

I think those are all fair points, but if, historically, China was able to overcome most of those same obstacles, I don't see why Russia couldn't too.

Re port cities, Russia alone had Murmansk, Kaliningrad, St. Petersburg, Novorossiyk, and Vladivostok. That's not a lot of major commercial ports, compared to China or the USA, but the Baltic States and Warsaw Pact nations would add a few more to that list.

Re ethnicities, I'm not sure if that would hinder free market reforms to a prohibitive degree. China has approximately 100 million people belonging to ethnic minorities and still managed it. If the Soviet gov't could force its ethnic minorities to accept an inefficient command economy for half-a-century, it could probably coax them into partaking in a hybrid economy. Enjoying a Big Mac every once in a while might help some Soviet citizens to forget how oppressed they are politically. Bread and circuses...

Re paranoia, pride, isolationism, etc- certainly, those would all be obstacles to meaningful economic reforms, but perhaps a Soviet regime, facing a truly existential looming economic crisis, could get past such psychological and cultural barriers to assure the survival of the state/empire. Mao wasn't exactly an internationalist. Even though most of the PRC's effective economic reforms post-dated his demise, China still had to overcome centuries of suspicion and outright hostility (300 years of Ming Dynasty isolationism, the Opium Wars, the Boxer Rebellion, etc.) towards foreign commercial interests.

For at least the last two decades of the Cold War, the Soviets were open to western products; the problem was, they couldn't afford them. Pepsi entered the Soviet market in the 1970s. The Soviets didn't have enough hard currency to buy much cola, so they traded alcohol and other agricultural products for it. In the most extreme example, the Soviet gov't even traded a handful of soon-to-be-scrapped warships to PepsiCo in 1989.

https://warisboring.com/the-cola-fleet-how-pepsi-once-controlled-the-worlds-sixth-largest-navy/

McDonalds opened its first location in Moscow in January of 1990, shortly before the dissolution of the USSR. Lines for the grand opening stretched for blocks. And who can forget Gorbachev's cameo in a 1997 Pizza Hut commercial

https://www.youtube.com/watchv=p3jA0SVtyUE

Given these historical precedents, I can see a Soviet government, desperate to save its tottering economy, embark upon a program of PRC-style market reforms in the 1980s and '90s. This wouldn't need to spark the kind of economic boom that China achieved IRL during the first decade of the 2000s- it would just need to be enough to keep the Soviet economy afloat until the Twilight War kicks off in the mid-1990s.

Corruption would be the biggest obstacle, IMHO. The government would need to adopt some serious semi-independent self-regulating mechanisms to weed that out. If doing business with the West was seen as a way to save the Soviet empire, Moscow would have a strong incentive to do so.

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[castlebravo92]

IMHO lots of things work against this.

Too few ports, too many borders, too many ethnicities, too paranoid, too confrontational, too proud, too isolationist, too expensive for foreign manufacturing, and too corrupt (Which compared to China is saying something).

China is also exceptionally corrupt, but they are corrupt in different ways.

The Chinese would court foreign investment, the foreign company/companies would move money into a China to build a factory in China to build widgets in the factory. The Chinese would keep the factory running on the 2nd and 3rd shift and sell the product under another label (and/or replicate the factory). In the end, the Chinese got factories and goods out of the deal.

The Russians would court foreign investment, the foreign companies would move money into Russia, and the Russians would steal the money. In the end, Russian government and mobsters (and government mobsters) got money funneled into Swiss bank accounts out of the deal.

Foreign capital investment also had a ~20 year head start in China, and it was in the West's best interest to prop up China as a bulwark against the USSR while it was in the best interest for the West for Russia to partially collapse.

[HaplessOperator]

Hmmm.

I'm not saying that the Russian military is good. My point is that, despite its many serious flaws, it's maybe not as bad as many analysts claimed it to be up until this year, or so. And, currently, there's growing concern that Russia may be about to break that stalemate, so the jury's still out on that point.



To be fair, the USA has been definitively stalemated by two far less powerful countries during the last 50 years (essentially bracketing the Late Cold War period), so we're not the world-beaters the jingoists proclaim us to be either.
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We are when it comes to fighting a conventional conflict, wherein soldiers aren't expected to not fire at people carrying mortars and machine guns, and don't have to swab gunshot residue tests on the hands of people who were trying to kill them five minutes prior while bagging shell casings, tagging rifles, collecting IDs, and taking photos of suspects like they're conducting police raids after treating the combatants' wounds. Using a military to fight a war against ghosts is a difficult proposition that works out about as well as it does in Spectral, and it doesn't really matter that you have F-22s or some of the best infantry on the planet when your opponent is a pair of 155mm artillery shells buried two feet deep two days before a winter rain.

I assume the other one you're talking about is Vietnam, where similar political concerns essentially kept us fighting with our hands tied behind our backs, trickling soldiers in slowly so as not to be offensive to the sensibilities of a hand-wringing public or politicians afraid of getting their constituencies' mandates mussed, and where the political realities of fighting against a guerrilla force

When it comes to superpowers doing actual superpower things, you can't really find an example of a stalemate, because there aren't any. About the closest you can point to is the Korean War, with the entire military apparatus of China and North Korea fighting us before anything resembling modern American doctrine of technologically-enabled maneuver warfare or full spectrum dominance was even a sparkle in anyone's eye.

Those F-16s, F-15s, and F-22s come in awfully handy against an enemy that's stuck with duct-taping GPS receivers to their instrument panel, though, and I haven't met a BMP that can survive the ordnance equivalent of a gnat fart, and threat systems weren't any more advanced or better armored 25 years ago.

That you're talking about Russia potentially, possibly breaking a stalemate against such a weak adversary after three years is sort of telling in and of itself. The last time Russia had any real chance of winning a conventional war against the West was probably back around 1979-1983 or so. Sure, they're a wild nuclear threat, assuming they've been able to maintain their arsenal, but that's a fairly long shot, too. We have an arsenal somewhat smaller, and spend as much maintaining our nukes each year as they allocate for their entire military budget.

[HaplessOperator]

Some reading.

Let me start by saying I think the Red Army is, and always has been, capable and worthy of respect. It would always give the US and NATO a real run for their money.

However, in the T2K lore, it seems just the opposite has come to pass. The US and NATO and other allies (ROK, etc) are getting their ass kicked at every turn. The idea that the Red Army could get in a protracted war with China, then lose some of their WARSAW Pact allies to the West and then charge through Poland causing the collapse of Western Europe is crazy. And then, it's the US Government that falls apart- crazy! In My Humble Opinion.

Let's remember, it was the Soviet Union that actually fell apart. It was the Red Army that was much more hollow and ineffective than we had thought, while the US was more capable than we imagined.

In the end, it's just a game and the GM can determine how he wants to create reality so it shouldn't matter at the PC level.

If you want a good look into how rotten the Soviet military was from stem to stern, you should give "The Threat: Inside the Soviet Military Machine" by Andrew Cockburn a read.

If you thought America's brief Hollow Army phase after Vietnam was something, you should prepare to have your mind blown. They seem to have suffered through a similar situation worse by several degrees, more pervasive, and lasting from WWII essentially to the collapse.

[Raellus]

Devil's Advocate

I assume the other one you're talking about is Vietnam, where similar political concerns essentially kept us fighting with our hands tied behind our backs, trickling soldiers in slowly so as not to be offensive to the sensibilities of a hand-wringing public or politicians afraid of getting their constituencies' mandates mussed, and where the political realities of fighting against a guerrilla force.

You're right. Granted, it's apples to oranges, but "the politicians wouldn't let us win" narrative about the Vietnam War has been overplayed by American military apologists. Although the we didn't go so far as to invade North Vietnam or use nuclear weapons, the US did indeed try very hard to win. By 1968, we had half-a-million troops on the ground in South Vietnam, and US combat troops in Vietnam spent more time in active combat zones than they did in either world war. In addition, we dropped a greater tonnage of bombs on North Vietnam during the conflict than we did versus the combined Axis Powers in WWII (and with more accuracy, to boot).

When it comes to superpowers doing actual superpower things, you can't really find an example of a stalemate, because there aren't any. About the closest you can point to is the Korean War, with the entire military apparatus of China and North Korea fighting us before anything resembling modern American doctrine of technologically-enabled maneuver warfare or full spectrum dominance was even a sparkle in anyone's eye.

I mentioned the Korean War upthread. Despite post-WW2 draw-downs, the US possessed the most technologically advanced military in the world at that time- at least a sparkle, as you put it. China, on the other hand, had recently emerged from decades of civil war and Japanese occupation. Still the US/UN couldn't decisively defeat the PLA. Given your point quoted above, this seems like a fair historical comparison vis-a-vis the hypothetical Twilight War.

I also posted the following:

The Cold War Soviet military was never tested against a near peer adversary, and neither was the US military. The lessons derived from the post-Soviet collapse period are informative, but by no means conclusive. We're making sweeping inferences from the poor performance of the rump Russian military in Chechnya and the USA's stellar performance in Desert Storm.

Therefore, whatever the conclusion one arrives at- the USSR as paper tiger or as formidable foe- we're essentially dealing in counterfactuals. The purpose of the OP was to support a plausible alternate reality where the Twilight War, as described in 1e or 2-2.2e canon (4e didn't exist yet), could have occurred.

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In other words, the goal here is to make the game work. And, on principle, I want to hedge against succumbing to the twin traps of overconfidence in one's own side and underestimating the adversary.

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[HaplessOperator]

Very Little Cheekiness Indeed

The Cold War Soviet military was never tested against a near peer adversary, and neither was the US military. The lessons derived from the post-Soviet collapse period are informative, but by no means conclusive. We're making sweeping inferences from the poor performance of the rump Russian military in Chechnya and the USA's stellar performance in Desert Storm.

Therefore, whatever the conclusion one arrives at- the USSR as paper tiger or as formidable foe- we're essentially dealing in counterfactuals. The purpose of the OP was to support a plausible alternate reality where the Twilight War, as described in 1e or 2-2.2e canon (4e didn't exist yet), could have occurred.

...

In other words, the goal here is to make the game work. And, on principle, I want to hedge against succumbing to the twin traps of overconfidence in one's own side and underestimating the adversary.
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At the risk of sounding more than a little cheeky, I'd hazard that there's more than a few reasons why the one was a campaign of horrific loss and a near-unbroken string of setbacks punctuated by slaughter against a military one fifth the size of our Marine Corps, while the other led to the near-total operational annihilation of the fourth-largest military on the planet, conducted across a distance of 3000 miles, separated by an ocean, and concluded within about four days, against half a million troops concentrated in an area 2/3 the size of Texas and against one of the densest AA networks then in existence.

Counterfactuals aren't always accurate, but they very well can be used to draw basic inferences. It's not as if we can't draw valid inferences or critiques from those two well-understand wars against multiple well-understood forces using well-understood equipment; the same can be said of the ongoing conflict in Ukraine.

It's not as if we all haven't seen two years of videos of an up-armored, modernized T-80 being killed by a single Carl Gustav hit, or a T-90AM worn the hell out by a bone stock ODS Bradley, or "hypersonic" missiles being shot down by Stingers and Iglas during terminal approach. No, these aren't engagements against NATO troops using NATO equipment, except in the cases where they're using gifted pld war stock that was too out of date to be modern by ten years even when I was serving, and I'd be retired this year, but that should tell anyone watching all this something in and of itself.

[Raellus]

I hear you. Again, i am playing devil's advocate. Why stop now

Russia eventually reconquered Chechnya. I've written entire essays on how the Iraqi and Soviet armies are not synonymous earlier in this thread so if your curious, you know where to look.

We've also seen M1 tanks taken out by RPG-7s in Iraq and an F-117 shot down over Serbia by an SA-3 SAM so...

Out of curiosity, since you strongly believe that the Soviet Union was no match for NATO from the mid-1980s through... today, why are you a T2k fan, given its central premise and all

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[HaplessOperator]

Like Marge Simpson, I just think it's neat.

I hear you. Again, i am playing devil's advocate. Why stop now

Russia eventually reconquered Chechnya. I've written entire essays on how the Iraqi and Soviet armies are not synonymous earlier in this thread so if your curious, you know where to look.

We've also seen M1 tanks taken out by RPG-7s in Iraq and an F-117 shot down over Serbia by an SA-3 SAM so...

Out of curiosity, since you strongly believe that the Soviet Union was no match for NATO from the mid-1980s through... today, why are you a T2k fan, given its central premise and all

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Mostly because of the mechanics (of both 2.2 and 4), the military focus, and the depth of squad-level wargaming it lends itself to - without outright being a wargame. The post-war setting, aesthetic, and atmosphere is compelling as well, even if the premise itself for how it happened isn't all that believable.

I think a big part of what happened is just that time marched on, and we know a lot more than a couple of random guys from the 80s.

I personally find it a lot more believable to just assume the Soviets went a little more nuke-happy. I don't believe they weren't a match for NATO; a conventional one, no, but they posed (and Russia now poses) a credible nuclear threat.

[kato13]

Out of curiosity, since you strongly believe that the Soviet Union was no match for NATO from the mid-1980s through... today, why are you a T2k fan, given its central premise and all

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I am guilty of this as well.

In the 80s I believed much more in the Soviets than I do now.

As time has moved on I feel the timeline must be changed earlier and earlier. Given you have to explain an alternate history now (rather than the projected future back in 1984) who cares if the alt history starts in 1989 or 1972.

Red Dawn threw like 7 Alt history sentences to us to set the stage for that conflict.

[Raellus]

I am guilty of this as well. In the 80s I believed much more in the Soviets than I do now.

Me too. I'm just trying to keep my youth alive here!

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[Vespers War]

I hear you. Again, i am playing devil's advocate. Why stop now

Russia eventually reconquered Chechnya. I've written entire essays on how the Iraqi and Soviet armies are not synonymous earlier in this thread so if your curious, you know where to look.

We've also seen M1 tanks taken out by RPG-7s in Iraq and an F-117 shot down over Serbia by an SA-3 SAM so...

Out of curiosity, since you strongly believe that the Soviet Union was no match for NATO from the mid-1980s through... today, why are you a T2k fan, given its central premise and all

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I was just discussing that Nighthawk shoot-down elsewhere, so the amazing circumstances surrounding it are still relatively fresh in my memory:

There were a bunch of mistakes on the American side that made the shootdown easier.

The airfield was being spied on by Serbs who were transmitting information back to the military about what was flying and when. Allegedly there was also a mole somewhere in Italy with access to operational information sending that to the Serbs as well.

On the night of the shootdown, weather had grounded the EA-6B Prowlers that had been escorting F-117s with radar jammers and HARM missiles to counter SAM batteries.

The Nighthawks were using the same ingress and egress routes they had used before, making them predictable.

The SAM battery had been told where to emplace to be able to engage the Nighthawks. This battery had previously tried to engage twice without being able to lock on to an aircraft.

The low frequency radar spotted the flight at a range of 15 miles (the normal range against a fighter was 200 miles). The tracking radar never saw the aircraft, and at first the guidance radar didn't either. They had been directed to only do short periods with the radar on to avoid getting a HARM fired at them, but since the battery CO had been told the Prowlers weren't firing, he lit off the guidance radar a second time.

By coincidence, that happened at the same time that one of the Nighthawks was dropping a bomb, and the radar saw the inside of the bomb bay at a range of 5 miles (normal range 50 miles). A pair of SA-3 were fired. Neither achieved a direct hit and the first detonated too far away to cause damage, but the second one detonated close enough to the Nighthawk to cause damage that led to its crash. The guidance radar never saw the other two Nighthawks that weren't open while it was emitting.

So yes, an SA-3 shot down an F-117, but it took a rather remarkable string of actions to get there - the air defense knew where the aircraft would be, when they would be arriving, may have known what the targets that night were, knew there was no SEAD escort, took advantage of that knowledge to make a second try that would have likely gotten them killed if there was a SEAD escort, and got lucky with the timing on the second try.

It ended up being a combination of complacency on the American side, good intelligence work and a gutsy battery commander on the Serb side, and a dollop of luck on top that allowed that shootdown to happen.

[Targan]

You're right. Granted, it's apples to oranges, but "the politicians wouldn't let us win" narrative about the Vietnam War has been overplayed by American military apologists. Although the we didn't go so far as to invade North Vietnam or use nuclear weapons, the US did indeed try very hard to win. By 1968, we had half-a-million troops on the ground in South Vietnam, and US combat troops in Vietnam spent more time in active combat zones than they did in either world war. In addition, we dropped a greater tonnage of bombs on North Vietnam during the conflict than we did versus the combined Axis Powers in WWII (and with more accuracy, to boot).

With the benefit of long hindsight, I think the biggest factor in the US losing the Vietnam War was that US political leaders as well as the leaders of the military and intelligence services fundamentally misunderstood Indochina's history from the Vietnamese perspective. Ho Chi Minh was very much an "accidental communist". Literally the only reason he became a communist was that his repeated attempts to have a seat at the table at the Paris Peace Accords in 1919 and 1920 were ignored. It was the same after World War II. The US very much could have chosen a different path with respect to supporting France's continued colonialism in Indochina, but chose not to (and flying in the face of its own decades-long proclamations on the right of peoples to choose how to be governed in their own lands). The Viet Minh were patriots, flighting for self determination. In the end the only support they could get was from the Soviet Union and Maoist China.

I mention these events because taking into account the tendency for the US, the UK, my own country, to misunderstand the motivations of its adversaries can absolutely be used in our various attempts to devise alt-histories that would bring about the Twilight War. Likewise the tendencies of the Warsaw Pact nations and other belligerents to misunderstand the motivations of the US and the NATO countries. I really enjoy seeing those elements in T2K alt-histories, because that sort of thing has resulted in wars and the direction of conflicts countless times in human history.