I was 19 year old back in 1991 and as far as I can remember, the struggle between Yeltsin and Gorbachev was an important immediate cause for the final breakup of the Soviet Union. The union consisted of several republics and most of these had been a part of the Russian Empire prior to the Revolution. My impression from the time was that because Yeltsin had the Russian Republic as his base and because he wanted to weaken Gorbachev, he also weakened the Soviet Union and was therefore partly to blame for the fact that the other republics became independent, as the Soviet Union was now the only organisational link between Russia and the other republics. Would it have been enough to avoid the collapse of the Soviet Union if Yeltsin and Gorbachev had been able to arrive at some settlement. Could the union have been reorganised so as to make the different regions parts of Russia, as they had been prior to the Revolution?