This is not an ask for help, I just want to leave this here for posterity.

So in Crisis in the Kremlin you must manage the Soviet Union from 1985 onwards, dealing with crisis, changing policies and the nation's budget.

Sometimes this game popped up in my mind because I never managed to "win" it, just stay in power with a union dissolved and a nation surviving but in ruinous debt. So I decided to try again and perhaps discover the intricacies of the most mysterious part of the game: the budget. My challenge being: Can I keep the union playing as a hard liner?

I managed to uncover some of how the budget works, but could not adjust it so the nation would prosper, even reading the manual tips didn't help.

So I used cheat engine to give myself an "infinite" amount of money to see if maxing all social values I could have a different outcome, and the result, as I suspected back then when I first started playing this game in my teenage years is: No, you can't keep the union. As I can infer, many of the events are scripted and cannot be altered regardless of how well the nation is.

You can set economic aid sliders of republics/soviet bloc/foreign aid to 9999 and it won't affect any outcome.

So the game sets you up in a linear path and only gives you the illusion of choice and control, you can have all your stats maxed in the green and it won't matter;

So that's it, I just wanted to share this for anyone in the future. There is also an spiritual successor of this game in Steam with the same name, but I didn't find it as interesting as the original.