On Wed, 17 Aug 2011, // ravi wrote:
> do you feel we (Russia and the world) would be the same today if Putin
> had succeeded Chernenko?
There couldn't have happened. Putin wasn't selected into the central committee. He wasn't the kind of guy they were looking for then. He emerged a decade later, quite surprisingly, through completely ad hoc channels, with much the opposite mission in response to the opposite situation: when the SU had entirely broken up quite chaotically and Russia itself seemed threatened with the same by the Chechnya on the one hand and the oligarchs on the other.
But in an alternative science fiction universe, where Putin was 20 years older, and the central committee was made of different guys, certainly it would be different. Russia might have gone a path more similar to China's. It would have been just as consequential for world history, however.
Michael