During the final days of the Soviet Union, a referendum for the preservation of the USSR was held on March 17, 1991, with the majority of the population voting for preservation of the Union in nine out of 15 republics. The referendum gave Gorbachev a minor boost, and, in the summer of 1991, the New Union Treaty was designed and agreed upon by eight republics which would have turned the Soviet Union into a much looser federation.
The new alignment, the Union of Sovereign States (Russian: Сою́з Сувере́нных Госуда́рств [ССГ] Soyuz Suverennykh Gosudarstv [SSG]) (sometimes also rendered as the Union of Soviet Sovereign Republics), was a less centralized federal system as a solution to the Soviet Union's increasing ethnic problems.
In the referendum 76% of voters supported maintaining the federal system of the Soviet Union, including a majority in all of the nine republics. Opposition was greatest in large cities like Leningrad and Moscow. The referendum was mostly boycotted in the other six republics already moving towards independence.
An agreement between the Soviet central government and the nine republics, the so-called "9+1" agreement was finally signed in Novo-Ogaryovo on April 23. The New Union Treaty would have converted the Soviet Union into a federation of independent republics with a common president, foreign policy, and military.
By August, eight of the nine republics, except Ukraine, approved the draft of the new Treaty with some conditions. Ukraine did not agree on the terms of the Treaty. In the republican referendum on March 17, the majority of residents of Ukraine supported joining the Union on the terms of Declaration of State Sovereignty of Ukraine.
However, the day before the New Union Treaty and the SSG were to be announced, the August Coup took place. The coup was an attempt by a group of members of the Soviet Union's government to take control of the country from Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev. The coup leaders were hard-line members of the Communist Party (CPSU) who felt that Gorbachev's reform program had gone too far and that a new union treaty that he had negotiated dispersed too much of the central government's power to the republics. Although the coup collapsed in only two days and Gorbachev returned to government, the event destabilised the Soviet Union and is widely considered to have helped in bringing about both the demise of the Communist Party and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Eventually, much of the framework for the SSG made it the initial plans for the current CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States). However, in practice the SSG wouldn't have been quite as loose and ad-hoc an arrangement as the CIS is, which at the time was simply trying to hold on to something.
So, WI the August Coup is postponed, for whatever reason, by a mere two days, allowing the New Union Treaty to be announced. Does the Coup even take place then? If so, what differences arise - what is the ultimate outcome for the Coup, for Russia, for the Union, and for the World?