WI: No August 1991 Coup in the Soviet Union

The August coup attempt was an effort by Soviet leadership to forcibly remove Gorbachev from power and to preserve the Soviet Union. It failed, and in actuality allowed the fall of the Soviet Union due to it preventing the Union of Sovereign States proposal (which would have preserved the Soviet Union) from coming to fruition.

What if the August 1991 coup had never been?
 
The New Union Treaty is signed as planned, and the USSR becomes a decentralized polity named the Union of Sovereign States, as you indicated. How exactly this new arrangement would turn out, I'm not sure, but it's certain the collapse of the USSR would not occur as it did OTL. The new USS would probably limp on for a few years before splintering further due to the 1998 economic crisis and other crises. However, it may be also possible that the USS may weather through the storm and live on to the present day.
 
The thing was, plenty of the republics were already decentralizing for years from Moscow. The coup scared the republics into thinking that the reforms would be reversed and thus publicly declaring their nominal independence , but at this point the Red Army wasn't capable of militarily intervening. At the end of the day the Red Army was what kept the USSR together and when the threat was no longer viable the USSR fell apart.
 
The thing was, plenty of the republics were already decentralizing for years from Moscow. The coup scared the republics into thinking that the reforms would be reversed and thus publicly declaring their nominal independence , but at this point the Red Army wasn't capable of militarily intervening. At the end of the day the Red Army was what kept the USSR together and when the threat was no longer viable the USSR fell apart.

I think this is the key point. If the Republics hadn't been spooked into defederalizing as fast as possible with a coup, Gorbachev probably could have negotiated a much more orderly transition away from the centralized USSR-state and created a CIS in more than just a name-only thing.

Would have definitely changed things compared to what happened IOTL.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Russia_(1992–present)
 
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