Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="uk 75" data-source="post: 482518" data-attributes="member: 234">The key to keeping the Soviet Union going in the 90s goes back further than Gorbachev.You need to replace Breshnev in the 1970s with a Gorbachev like figure. Some suggest that Yuri Andropov knew what was wrong with the USSR and might have put things right.The West was very much on the back foot in the 1970s after Vietnam and the Oil Price hike.Reagan arrives as in our timeline but has to deal with a different Gorbachev who takes over from Andropov at about the same time as Reagan replaces Carter.There is no Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 but East Germany is a more dynamic place than our GDR.  Gorbachev has got rid of Honecker and replaced him with Hans Modrow.  There is no Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1991 because there is no Saddam. The Soviets engineer his replacement by a Ba athist Council headed by Tariq Aziz in the aftermath of the disasterous Iran/Iraq war.George Bush has none of Reagan's charisma or Gorbachev's!The Soviets matched the Reagan Arms Build up (scope for the weapons discussed above) and took full advantage of it.South Africa descends into chaos in 1990 as the ANC receives greater Soviet and Chinese support than our timeline. India is much more closely aligned with Moscow not least because China has relied on the West to face growing Soviet influence in Vietnam and N Korea.</blockquote>