| August 20 |  |
Editor says, what if the August Putsch adventurists had struck three days later? Please note that the opinions expressed in this post do not necessarily reflect the views of the author(s). This story was published in the November 2011 edition of Changing the Times Magazine.
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In 1991, on this day the signing of the "New Union Treaty" by eight newly independent republics effectively dissolved the Soviet Union replacing it with a Federation with a common president, foreign policy, and military.
Future CountryThe ceremony was a personal triumph for Mikhail Gorbachev who for six long years had laboured to salvage and reform the Soviet state in order to avert a complete collapse of central government function. Launched at the Communist Party Congress of July 1990 as the logical successor to the 1922 Treaty on the Creation of the USSR, the model of a less centralized federal system was a potential solution to the region's increasing ethnic problems.
Another perhaps more immediate problem was the political rivalry between Gorbachev, and Boris Yeltsin who only two months earlier had been elected to the newly created post of president of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic with 57% of the vote, becoming the first democratically elected leader of Russia in history. For the past eight weeks, Gorbachev had been unable to fulfil domestic executive function, increasingly focusing on foreign affairs and the signing of the "New Union Treaty".
The establishment's determined efforts to forestall the rise of Yeltsin had caused a bitter animosity between the two men. And so the original issue of whether the die hard Soviets would permit Gorbachev to see out his programme of perestrokia was superseded by a new question. Was the new dual power structure of Union and Russian Presidents inherently unstable, or even if it was stable would personal rivalry prevent the new model from working effectively?
That very evening Gorbachev found out the answers to those questions when he was informed that Yeltin had been placed under house arrest by the KGB. To be continued..
Entry posted by Todayinah Editor
© Alternate Historian, 2004-.Story Tags
Permalinks: Post, Day. Browse Thread: Politicians Source: Wikipedia Labels: Soviet Union, Russia, Gorbachev, Yeltsin, New Union Treaty. Editor says, in this article we explore an original idea on the Alt History Wikia. Also we have repurposed content from Wikipedia which concludes ~ the Union of Sovereign States was the proposed name of a reorganization of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics into a new confederation body. Proposed by Mikhail Gorbachev, the proposal was an attempt to avert the collapse of the Soviet Union. The proposal was never implemented in the wake of the August Coup and the eventual dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. The overall proposal was resurrected as the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).
~ Batten down the hatches...
~ I think by this time just about everybody was sick of the whole "Soviet" thing and wanted it _over._ I don't know how long a post-USSR state would last.
~ They wated to be independant so they could all kill each other in the Balken wars. :)
~ Actually the big push for independence was the three Baltic states and the three south Caucasus republics [also some sub-republics in the north Caucasus but that's another story of Chechen banditry interlaced with global jihad]. The Slavs and Stans were more the case of Yeltsin forcing the issue and the republic nomenklaturas following along behind.
~ "Sick of the whole 'Soviet' thing"? What does that mean, exactly?
I suspect that had Gorbachev's reforms of the 1980s been followed by a rise in Soviet living standards the USSR wuld still exist. For all the pious talk about people wanting "freedom," most people are perfectly happy to see freedom (especially that of *other* people) thrown under the bus as long as they're doing well in material terms.
Cynical? Sure--but how much resistance was there among oredinary to the Nazis in the thirties, when Germany was doing well after yeares of privation? How many Germans (and not just those in the East) longed for a Nazi return in the hard years after World war II? I doubt the Russians are much different.
~ If it gets messy, it might drag the US into it in some kind of diplomacy attempt. What if the Cold War ended by going hot just when everybody thought it was over?
© Today in Alternate History, 2013-. All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
