Certainly some of the core republics might be game, considering the large Russian populations you have in Ukraine and Kazakhstan. A Russian insistence on redrawing the borders to include Russian populations within Russian territory might have intimidated some of these states into staying in the union rather than seeing large pieces of their putative nation-states break off (the eastern third of Ukraine, the northern third of Kazakhstan), even though this meant running a risk of Yugoslavian style civil war.
Also important is the state of play with respect to democratic elections. Yeltsin supported Russian secession (and this is how it actually came off, Russia seceding from the USSR rather than the periphery) because the reformists had a much greater presence in the Russian legislatures than in the USSR's institutions and he felt he had a better chance working with them in the position he already held as president of the Russian entity rather than attempting to take power in the whole USSR.
So if somehow you invert it, make the USSR the reform-friendly unit rather than the individual republics, lead Yeltsin to invest in that framework rather than its dissolution, then you have something with at least the boundaries of the USSR, though I don't think it's at all possible to keep Georgia and the Baltics without some pretty heinous uses of military force tha would poison the whole project.
I think Gorbachev's involvement in any way though would spoil the project as well. He was by the time of the coup the most unpopular politician in Russia, and is really reviled even today.
The key is of course that the union part not invalidate the democratic part. That's the real question. This has to be more like Canada dealing with Quebec than Yugoslavia dealing with Bosnia or Kosovo.