DBWI: Could the Soviet Civil War have been avoided?

How could the Soviet Civil War have been prevented? Is it is simple as preventing the August Coup and the deaths of Gorbachev and Yeltsin? Or is an earlier POD needed? And if Soviet collapse is inevitable, could it happen peacefully, without massive ethnic cleansing, as happened in Abkhazia, Chechnya, Estonia and Nagorno-Karabakh? Or is a violent collapse inevitable? Could the USSR move towards democracy, or is a totalitarian dictatorship like OTL's Union State inevitable?
 

Gaius Julius Magnus

Gone Fishin'
Avoiding Gorbachev and his attempted reforms that the hardliner coup was a reaction to could be a possibility.

Of course, no telling what a reformless continuation of the Brezhnev-era Soviet Union would end up like but couldn't be any worse than what happened in the 90s.
 
(OOC question for OP: ITTL, how did NATO, China, and rest of the Eastern Bloc / Warsaw Pact react to the USSR falling apart violently here? Did they all intervene militarily somehow? Were any nuclear weapons detonated?)
 
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What happened in Estonia is difficult to quantify. On one hand the Russian inhabitants tried to help the union state take back control of it, on the other hand the Estonians out right expelled every person of Russian dissent from their country in the course of a month which resulted in about 10% of them dying. The union state blames the west for all of the civilian deaths but the Estonians claim that union states agitators and terrorists made them cleanse their country of Russian and habitats to maintain there safety.
 
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