In the excellent alt-history drama For All Mankind, which just completed its third season on Apple TV+, the Space Race between the Soviet Union and the United States never ends. In that reality, the Soviets beat America to the Moon, giving that regime a long-term confidence boost, both at home and abroad. In the early 1990s, Mikhail Gorbachev is the leader of a still-intact USSR that’s now racing the US to Mars.

Ridiculous, right? Surely, the inherent flaws of communism—including a fundamental misunderstanding of human nature and lack of economic dynamism—inevitably led to implosion. (With a healthy push in the 1980s from the American president and the Catholic pope.) Although, the communists by the 1980s seemed to have firm control of the country, less so the economy. A middle-income country with potentially significant ability to grow faster—especially given its education, scientific base, and natural resources—the economy was muddling along at roughly 2 percent GDP growth a year. Even worse, the US economy was booming.

But a strong case can be made that it wasn’t economic failure that led to the demise of the Soviet Union. Slow growth is not the same as negative growth, and inflation-adjusted wages were rising at a healthy clip over the latter half of the decade. As AEI scholar Leon Aron wrote in a 2011 essay for Foreign Policy magazine:

Certainly, there were plenty of structural reasons—economic, political, social—why the Soviet Union should have collapsed as it did, yet they fail to explain fully how it happened when it happened. How, that is, between 1985 and 1989, in the absence of sharply worsening economic, political, demographic, and other structural conditions, did the state and its economic system suddenly begin to be seen as shameful, illegitimate, and intolerable by enough men and women to become doomed?

The ascension of Gorbachev to national leadership is key. Aron: “The core of Gorbachev’s enterprise was undeniably idealistic: He wanted to build a more moral Soviet Union. For though economic betterment was their banner, there is little doubt that Gorbachev and his supporters first set out to right moral, rather than economic, wrongs.” And with that moral impulse was “deep and personal aversion to violence and, hence, his stubborn refusal to resort to mass coercion when the scale and depth of change began to outstrip his original intent.”

Of course, the awakening that was happening inside the Kremlin wasn’t the only thing that mattered, even on the ideas front. Not sufficient but almost certainly necessary to the, Aron writes, “intellectual and moral quest for self-respect and pride that, beginning with a merciless moral scrutiny of the country’s past and present, within a few short years hollowed out the mighty Soviet state, deprived it of legitimacy, and turned it into a burned-out shell that crumbled in August 1991. The tale of this intellectual and moral journey is an absolutely central story of the 20th century’s last great revolution.”

It’s one of the great “what if” speculations to wonder what Russia would be like today if the Gorbachev project was successful. Perhaps a reimagining of “Finlandization” where the core of the former Soviet Empire became the core of a Scandinavian-style alliance of social democracies. As William Taubman writes in Gorbachev: His Life and Times:

Even before he left office, Gorbachev had become a kind of social democrat—believing in, as he later put it, equality of opportunity, publicly supported education and medical care, a guaranteed minimum of social welfare, and a “socially oriented market economy”—all within a democratic political framework. Exactly when this transformation occurred is hard to say, but surely by 1989 or 1990 it had taken place.

Maybe the Soviet Union of For All Mankind is well on its way to becoming a social democracy. Maybe we’ll find out next season, which takes a time jump to 2003.

The post Gorbachev, Idealism, and the End of the Soviet Union appeared first on American Enterprise Institute – AEI.