In his book, Predicting Politics, political scientist Bruce Bueno de Mesquita simulates the Cold War as a battle over ideology between different countries. He allows the salience of foreign policy to vary randomly in each run of the simulation; military, economic, and demographic capabilities are set at the outset and then vary over time due to conflict or cooperation between states. Anyway, what his model finds is that most of the time, the USSR more or less gives in and moves to the US position on international ideology. Still, in at least a quarter of cases, the opposite happens (usually because the US cannot assemble a coalition that cares about ideology and it suffers costs from resisting a more-powerful Soviet bloc alone). I'm not entirely persuaded by the simulations, but the model has been reasonably accurate as a forecasting tool, so it's not unreasonable to suppose that if Europe and Japan went to the far left, the US would basically withdraw from intense competition with the Soviet Union, leaving it to set the international agenda. Political science is probably as close to counterfactual history as you'll get, since all cause-effect statements necessarily include counterfactuals (e.g. if A makes B more likely, then B must be less likely absent A).

Hi, quick moderator request for you: could you remove the following section?

In an alternate world where the USA went communist and Russia went free-market capitalist, would history have leaned more in Russia's favor or not? Would Russian culture ever have striven for free-market capitalism in the first place?

This subreddit does not permit speculation on possible alternative pasts. Rather, those questions would be more suited to one of the counterfactual subs like /r/HistoryWhatif.

Thanks!

Sadly I have few sources on hand, I'll be writing from memory here, the only source I have on hand is "The Penguin History of Russia", a relic from when I studied the Russians back in Uni.

As with most historical conjecture, it depends. Russia would have needed some remarkable stroke of luck to overcome America, something like a Civil War in the states, some Diplomatic Coup or a successful one sided nuclear strike. Russia couldn't compete with America conventionally because of one extremely pertinent point.

Russia's Navy wasn't good enough.

I know it's really Mahanian of me, but Navies are the prinicpal way though which international power is asserted. Without a Navy Russian Power was limited to where their men could march, further limited by the supply trains needed to march/fight wherever they were projecting their power. The Americans could fight anywhere, almost any time.

Russia posed a threat to Europe, but not America. Economically there was never any completion, diplomatically the Russians definitely made gains, but not enough to tip the global balance of power.

So, in short, the Russian economy and geography stymied any potential attempts to match American conventional power, only though unconventional means could the Russians hope to defeat America.

Related question: did many Western leaders see the west as having an advantage over the Communist world?

Looking back, it's pretty easy to see how weak the Communist world was. Did anybody see it that way at the time?

My very uninformed understanding is that most leaders saw the two sides as equal, or the Communists were winning.

The better question is whether anyone actually "won" the Cold War, or if one actually existed to begin with.

Note that while the Soviet Union has collapsed Russia still exists and still retains a fair number of warheads from the Cold War; and is even expanding the deployment of its delivery systems such as the recent completion of three new ballistic missile submarines. Russia moreover was never "defeated" in the same way as Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan - not a single foreign soldier was involved in its collapse; and it can be quite convincingly argued not a single diplomatic or economic move made by the West in fact contributed to the "collapse" - everything was decided by the people and leadership of the USSR itself.

What has changed is Russia's direct control over Ukraine and other states within the USSR (which has now devolved to partial control), and their indirect control over Central Europe via the Warsaw Pact (which they themselves allowed to be relinquished anyway - Gorbachev could have sent in the tanks any time like the Soviets did in the 1950s. He didn't.).

But the Cold War wasn't supposed to be about fighting over Central Europe or Ukraine - it was supposedly an ideological conflict between "capitalism" and "communism". The latter in fact still exists - indeed it had always existed in the West in the form of "socialist" movements and still exists in China. Very few people want to admit this though because it will make all of the US chest-beating for the past 20 years about the Cold War "victory" seem rather hollow.

Depends when exactly you're talking about. Right after the war ended the European allies and Germany were smashed, and yet Russia's military-industrial situation was the best it had ever been. The atomic bomb however was a severe deterrent, so without having to worry about it the Russians could have led an offensive westwards. Unfortunately for them, over the long term the Soviet economy and military didn't age well, and according to sources like Viktor Suvorov, in his analysis of the internal workings of the red army, in the 1960s Soviet officers worried they couldn't beat the West German Bundeswehr, never mind a combined NATO force. In their view the second world war had been their zenith.

The USSR could also have gone on, like North Korea has, if not for the fact they chose to deStalinise and gradually thereafter loosen the authority and control the Communist party had on everything. Keep in mind the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 was because orthodox Communists feared that a free press was more dangerous to the Soviet model than starvation or war. In his book on the invasion (The Liberators) Suvorov makes the point, citing a conversation he had at the time, that since the red army was essential to the harvest, deploying the army abroad that late into the year risked starvation. So in that context it makes perfect sense that the progressive reforms Gorbachev launched were the same sort his predecessors had put down with tanks, and the orthodox Communists had been right that such would be fatal to the system.

Bottom line is that the Soviets were unlikely to have won, especially outright, especially given atomic weapons, but they certainly could still be alive today, prolonging the conflict for a very long time, if not for their internal politics unfolding as it did.