No August Coup?

What if there had been no August Coup? Could the Soviet Union have lasted as a nation? Even one more like China is nowadays rather then a fully communist state.
 
the reason behind the coup was the fact that the old gaurd and staunch military conservatives felt that glasnost and perostrika had gone too far.. that the Soviet Empire was falling apart around them... the country was bankrupt and couldnt compete with the west. all that fear lead to the coup.. The cold war and Eastern Europe is lost.. Afghanistan is lost .. there pride severely beaten.. Plus all these new freedoms that comrade stalin or brezhnev would roll in their graves over was too much to handle..

Gorbachev didnt want it either.. but he knew that the only way to secure the future of the nation was to liberalize it.. more free enterprise.. property rights.. to cut the dead weight.. guess it was a bit too much fat trimming for the tastes of many.

I wouldnt call it china.. China is a much different beast.. 2+ billion people, plus a government that really likes control of things... I would say it would be more like the Scandinavian nations..

Honestly.. if there was no august coup.. You would have a new soviet union born out of the fires of the old.. minus certain outlaying areas such as the Baltic Nations. The model was changing in the politburo .. It could have worked had the soviets started in the 70's to address the problems.. and you would have had a SOCIALIST nation but not the "EVIL EMPIRE" one that is portrayed in western media.. Just too many years of screwed up leadership dating back to the late 1890's combined with a screwed up revolution and mismanagement afterwards kinda was hard to undo..

basically The old guard screwed it up by being the old guard...
 
Well, the treaty is probably reluctantly signed. The USSR becomes greatly decentralized, with only military and foreign policy being directed from the imperial center. The rest depends a lot upon what Yeltsin does. He's still the President of Russia, and according to the new treaty version of the USSR, he has more say in Russian domestic policy than Gorbachev did. Now if Yeltsin doesn't do anything differently here, there's a distinct possibility he's thrown out in 1993. There is no way Gorbachev is going to allow the Army to save Yeltsin's Presidency.

But with Gorbachev still in a position of relative power, Yeltsin may be inclined to shore up his support with the Russian legislative body. I know traditionally such bodies meant basically nothing in the USSR, but remember, the new USSR is not the old. It's basically a collection of independent countries that happen to share a military and foreign policy via an imperial center. I remember once reading an argument that Yeltsin made a major error in not calling an election in 1991. So Perhaps the whole drama in 1993 never happens here.

Even without the white house incident, Yeltsin still probably has some populist support here, this is 1991 not 1996. So maybe he calls such an election to make sure his support within the Russian government is enough to protect him from Gorbachev. Domestically, I see very little policy wise changing in Russia, unless Gorbachev somehow ousts Yeltsin, which before 1993 or so seems unlikely. Like I've said before they hated each other, so there is going to be some tension there. I doubt the New Union will break apart in 1991. But there's always a chance that the Yeltsin vs. Gorbachev fight could lead to the "Imperial Center" being done away with at some later date. I also don't know how long Gorbachev can last as the "President of the USSR" Down the line, assuming that there isn't a break, the biggest possible difference I see is that there might not be any Chechen wars.
 
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