Kevin: August nineteenth, nineteen ninety-one. A government dacha at Foros, on the southern tip of Crimea, where the cliffs drop straight into the Black Sea. The most powerful man in the Soviet Union walks into his study and picks up the phone. The line is dead. He tries a second phone. Dead. He tries the third, the one wired to the nuclear forces of a superpower. Also dead. Every line in the house has been cut. Mikhail Gorbachev is a prisoner. The men who locked him in here are his own, his vice president, his defense minister, and the head of the KGB. For two years they begged him to do one thing, the thing they swore would save the country. And for two years, he said no. So this morning, they stopped asking. They declared a state of emergency in his name. And rolled tanks into Moscow without him. It doesn't work. In 72 hours, the whole thing falls apart. A man named Boris Yeltsin climbs onto one of those tanks outside the Russian parliament. The soldiers refuse to fire on the crowd. Four months later, the Soviet Union is gone. But the crackdown the plotters wanted, the army sent in to hold the republics by force, had been an option. For two years. The only open questions were who would give the order and whether a single soldier would follow it. But what if Gorbachev had beaten them to it? What if instead of saying no one more time, he had declared the emergency himself as the lawful president months before any couple? Let's hit Control-Z. Welcome to Control Z Re-Rate, the podcast where we take the biggest decisions in history and ask, what happens if they go the other way? One decision where we hit Control Z, try it the other way, and see what changes. To understand the choice, you have to understand what Gorbachev was holding and how little of it was really still his. On paper, the USSR was the largest country that ever existed. 15 republics, 290 million people, 11 time zones, and around 30,000 nuclear warheads. Enough to end our species several times over. And underneath all of it, the place was broke. The state stores were empty. People stood in line for hours to buy bread. The government owed foreign banks something like $65 billion it couldn't pay back, and it had sold off almost all of its gold to cover that gap. The one thing the Soviet economy reliably sold the world was oil. But that price had crashed in 1986 and never came back. The superpower was insolvent. It was also coming apart from the outside in. Two years earlier, the whole outer ring of the empire broke away. Poland voted the communists out. The Berlin Wall came down in November. Weeks later, Czechoslovakia threw off its government in a bloodless rush they called the Velvet Revolution. In Romania, they stood the dictator against a wall on Christmas Day and shot him. And Gorbachev let all of it go. His own spokesman gave the policy a funny name, the Sinatra Doctrine. Eastern Europe could finally do it their way, like the song. I believe some would say they were doing something stupid. Now the same idea was loose inside the Soviet Union itself. The republics that actually made up the country, the Baltics, Ukraine, Georgia, the Central Asian states, they were watching Warsaw and Berlin and asking why they couldn't have the same thing. Now let's talk about Gorbachev for a second, because there is the Gorbachev of the prevailing narrative and the real Gorbachev. The narrative says he was the good communist, the gentle reformer, the one man who wouldn't use violence to hold his country together, which is why it slipped through his fingers. It's a lovely narrative. It's also false. Gorbachev used force again and again. In April 1989, in Tbilisi, the capital of Soviet Georgia, troops waded into a peaceful crowd, swinging sharpened shovels and firing poison gas. They killed 21 people, most of them women. In January 1990, in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, he sent in 26,000 soldiers, and in one night, they killed more than 130 people. And in January of 1991, weeks before the moment we are rewinding to. Special forces stormed the TV Tower in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, and drove tanks into the crowd that was defending it. Fourteen dead, all unarmed. So the question was never whether Gorbachev could spill blood. He'd already spilled it three times over. The question was whether he could commit, because every time he flinched. He'd order the violence, then the world would recoil and he'd back away. He'd deny that he authorized it, he would blame the local commanders, and like Cosmo Kramer, he would stop short. He wanted the empire whole, and he wanted the West to admire him. But no Soviet ruler gets both. So that's the decision in front of him. Does he fight, literally, to keep the Soviet Union together? And here's where we press Control Z. It's the spring of 1991. Vilnius just happened. The republics are still pulling away. The hardliners come into his office and tell him the country is dying, that only force can save it. But in this timeline, he doesn't flinch and he doesn't hide. He goes on television and declares a state of emergency across the entire Soviet Union, himself in his own name as the lawful president. Now that word, lawful, is the hinge this whole episode swings on. We know what happened when somebody tried to crack down on the Soviet Union without the law behind him. Somebody tried. That's the coup I mentioned at the top of the show. In August, the hardliners gave up on Gorbachev. They locked him in that house in Crimea, and they ran the crackdown themselves as a committee. But as I mentioned, it died in three days. The soldiers in Moscow wouldn't fire. Yeltsin stood on a tank and dared them, and they wouldn't do it. Because who were these men exactly? A vice president nobody respected, and a spy chief giving orders in the name of a president they'd just kidnapped? The army couldn't tell whose side the law was on, so it sat still. Now hand that same order to those same soldiers, except it comes from Gorbachev himself, the legitimate head of state, the commander in chief declaring an emergency through every legal channel the system has. Now the hesitation disappears. When the lawful president gives the order, the soldiers move. Same tanks, same men, same words as the coup that failed. The only thing that changed is the law standing behind the man who gave the order. So the tanks roll, and this time they don't stop. Yeltsin is arrested before sunrise instead of climbing onto anything. The crackdown starts in the republics, the same places as Tbilisi, Baku, and Vilnius. Except now it doesn't. Pull back when the casualty count hits the evening news. The independence movements lose their leadership to arrest, and the demonstrations are broken up. It's ugly, it's brutal, and it's final. But it works. The republics stay in the Union. The Soviet Union does not dissolve in December of 1991. It survives. The man his own hardliners spent two years writing off as two weeks. held the thing together, using the army exactly the way they'd been begging him to. Soldiers can take a television tower, they can put down a rebellion, but they can't fill a grocery store when there's no food. That's the problem the crackdown can't solve. Gorbachev saved the country's borders, but he didn't fix the one thing that was actually killing it. The shelves are still empty, the debt is crushing, and now it's worse. Martial law terrifies the West. And all the loans, the trade, and the goodwill Gorbachev had been chasing dry up overnight. So the men now running the surviving Soviet Union are stuck with the problem every broke dictatorship runs into. And they reach for the only solution they know. Keep the one party police state exactly as it is. Let the economy go capitalist. Private businesses, foreign investors around the edges, factories run for profit. But the state keeps full control of what matters the oil, the gas, the weapons, and the secret police. There's a name for this combination. It's called market Leninism. Communist politics, capitalist money, no daylight between them. China actually invented it. Now this wasn't a theory at the time. The biggest communist country on the planet had just done it right next door. June nineteen eighty nine The same year the Eastern Bloc began to come apart. China had its own uprising. Students packed Tiananmen Square in Beijing demanding reform, and the government sent in the tanks and crushed them. Then, having held the line by force, China spent the next 30 years getting staggeringly rich without ever holding a free election. Deng Xiaoping gave the order in that square and then spent the next decade opening China to Foreign factories and private business while the party kept total control. He'd shown that a communist government could crush its own protesters and still grow into an economic power. The surviving Soviet Union copies that model a couple of years later. This is also why the surviving Soviet Union never becomes a winner. China started from a good position. It was poor, but it had a young population, almost no foreign debt. Hundreds of millions of farmers ready to move into factories, and a West eager to invest. The Soviet Union starts from the opposite place. It's already industrialized, so the easy growth is gone. It's deep in debt. Decades of military spending have drained it. The West has it under sanctions, and it's spending soldiers and money to hold down republics that want out. It's the same strategy as China, but none of the same advantages. So it survives. and it stays poor. Picture less of a China and more of a North Korea, but North Korea with oil wells and a massive nuclear arsenal. It's poor and it's repressive, but it's still standing. Then, right on cue, it catches a break. In the 2000s, the price of oil goes through the roof. In our timeline, that boom is what let Russia recover, pay its bills, and feel like a great power again. Here, The same flood of petrodollars does the same job for the Soviet Union. It keeps the lights on, it pays the soldiers, and it funds the surveillance. It buys the regime another few decades. The empire runs on oil money and fear in roughly equal measure. And the people who get rich off of it are the ones who already run the state. The KGB officers and party bosses who control the oil and gas end up controlling the money too. None of which makes the inside of this country calm. Crushing the republics in nineteen ninety one settles nothing. It just drives the fight underground. The Baltic states, swallowed by Stalin in nineteen forty and fighting that ever since, become a permanent low-grade insurgency. So does the Muslim Caucasus, and so does the western third of Ukraine. A region called Galicia around the city of Lviv, grabbed by Stalin in nineteen thirty one. Is the most anti Soviet ground in the whole Union. In March 1991, the Kremlin held a referendum asking people whether to keep the Union together. In Galicia, 16% said yes. So Moscow holds this place the only way it can, with soldiers and no end date. And the borders hold, but the regime now spends the next several decades putting down low level rebellions that never fully stop. And there's one more thing the survival of the Soviet Union quietly rescues: the entire communist world. In our timeline, when the USSR went down, it dragged its dependence down with it. Cuba lost the Soviet subsidies that were propping it up. This was serious money, more than $4 billion a year, around a fifth of the island's entire economy. Without it, Cuba fell into a crisis so bad, the government gave it a name. They called it the special period. Serious hunger, terrible malnutrition. North Korea lost its Soviet oil and food in the same stretch, and they fell into a famine that killed somewhere between 3 and 5% of the population. And both catastrophes happened for one reason. Moscow stopped sending the check. But in this timeline, the money keeps rolling in. The Union survives, so Cuba never starves. North Korea never has its famine. The whole network of communist states around the world stays propped up by Soviet support. And that does something strange to the century. Communism never gets to fail in public. There's no mourning when the world watches the system collapse and decides out loud and for good that it doesn't work. The argument just stays open. The regime buys its own survival with oil money and force. And because it survives, the whole world that was supposed to die with it stays standing too. Now look at the other side of the world, at the country that was supposed to win the Cold War. If the Soviet Union doesn't fall, America never collects the prize it spent 45 years and a fortune chasing. And the first place you see it is in American politics. It's spring nineteen ninety-one. The president of the United States is George H. W. Bush, and he has a problem that's about to get solved in the worst possible way. He just won the Gulf War. His approval is near 90%. He looks unbeatable. Then a recession sets in, and by 1992, his numbers have fallen through the floor. Because Americans stopped thinking about the world and started thinking about their paychecks. In our timeline, that's the story of 1992. The Cold War was over, the threat was gone, and a charismatic young governor from Arkansas named Bill Clinton beats the war hero with a powerful slogan. It's the economy stupid. But in the Control-Z timeline, it's the economy and the Soviets stupid. While Bush runs for re-election, the Soviet Union is on the news every night. Tanks in the Baltics, a hostile nuclear superpower swallowing its own republics, a second Cold War freezing into place. So does Bush ride the fear to a second term? He doesn't. And this part is worth slowing down on because the easy guess is that a scary world saves the incumbent. But the easy guess is wrong. A live Cold War doesn't automatically save Bush. It just changes the kind of Democrat who can beat him. For 20 years, the knock on Democrats was that they were soft. They were doves, weak on defense. In a tense Cold War, that label is fatal. It would have sunk a candidate carrying it. But Clinton isn't that candidate. He's a centrist. He's hawkish. And he's the most gifted retail politician of his generation. The recession still sinks Bush. Clinton still wins. He just wins as a Cold War hawk instead of the peace and prosperity optimist that we got in our timeline. And that one change reshapes the next 20 years of American history. And that's because of the man he has to pick. To stand beside him. In real 1992, Clinton picked Al Gore, and that pick was already the closest thing the ticket had to a hawk. Gore was one of only 10 Democratic senators who voted for the Gulf War. Clinton put him there partly to kill the soft on defense Democrat problem, but now crank the pressure up. In a raging cold war with the Soviet Army crushing Lithuania on the evening news, a young senator isn't reassuring enough. Clinton needs a heavyweight, someone who can sit across a table from the men in the Kremlin and not blink. He needs a foreign policy lifer. So he picks Joe Biden. By 1992, Biden has spent the better part of 20 years in the Senate and most of it on foreign relations. He's exactly the gray beard a scared country wants one heartbeat from the presidency. And that one pick changes. the 2000 election. Because the vice president is the heir apparent. In our world, eight years as Clinton's number two is what set Gore up to run in 2000. Here, that inheritance lands on Biden. Joe Biden, who in our timeline doesn't reach the White House until he's nearly 80, is the Democratic nominee for president in 2000, at the peak of his powers. And the other party gets its own earthquake for a related reason. In our timeline, the Republican who won in 2000 was George W. Bush. Now, he won on two things, his father's name, and a soft peacetime message he called compassionate conservatism, schools and tax cuts. Now, run that campaign in the Control Z timeline and both of those collapse. The Bush name is no longer an asset because in this world, his father didn't preside over the peaceful end of the Soviet Union and retire a respected elder statesman. He just lost. A one term failure in a recession. And a gentle message about schools is a punchline in a country on a war footing. A Cold War election calls for a candidate with a war record. Enter John McCain. War hero, prisoner of war for more than five years, the most credible national security voice his party has. Now in our timeline, McCain ran in 2000 and lost the nomination to George W. Bush and the family machine that was running behind him. Take away that machine, put the country on a war footing, and McCain is the obvious choice. So, the 2000 election is Joe Biden versus John McCain. Two foreign policy heavyweights in a country that never stopped being afraid. There's no second President Bush. There's no Bush v. Gore, which means No Florida recount, no hanging chads, no Supreme Court handing a presidency to one side by a single vote. ⁓ that whole saga, which we talked about a couple episodes ago, the one that traumatized a generation, never happens. McCain edges out of victory in 2000 against his close friend Joe Biden. Eight straight years of one party plus a war hero in a fearful election is a lot to beat. But the bigger change here is the shape of American politics compared to our timeline. In a world where the Cold War never ends, American politics stays clamped onto national security for decades. Both parties keep reaching for generals, for hawks, and for war heroes. That whole tense, sweating, security obsessed style of the 1980s just keeps going. Straight through the 2000s instead of dissolving into culture wars and reality TV. Because that's what this timeline quietly steals from America: that holiday. In the real 1990s, America got to exhale. It cut the defense budget, it banked the savings, and it balanced the federal checkbook for the first time in a generation and spent the decade feeling safe and getting rich. But none of that happens here. Without peace, you can't have a peace dividend. The defense budget never comes down. The books never balance. And that feeling of finally having won of the long dread being over never arrives. The country just stays on watch. A surviving Soviet Union does more than just freeze the map in place. It changes the wars America actually fought this century. And in one case, it erases the worst day in modern American history. Let's start there. September 11, 2001. In the Control-Z timeline, it doesn't happen. Now the men who carried it out still exist, but what's missing is the chain behind them. Which runs straight through the Soviet Union. Al Qaeda needed a home base. The 9-11 plot wasn't cooked up in a cave over a weekend. This was a heavily planned operation that took years of training in camps in Afghanistan under the protection of the Taliban. But where did the Taliban come from? Trace it back, and the answer is the fall of the Soviet Union. Through the 1980s, the Soviets fought a long, losing war in Afghanistan. When they finally pulled their troops out in nineteen eighty nine, they left a friendly communist government behind in Kabul, run by a man named Najibula. Everyone expected him to fall in weeks, but he held on for three more years, beating back the rebels because Moscow kept him alive with a steady pipeline of money, weapons, and oil. His government lasted exactly as long as the Soviet Union did. The day the USSR collapsed at the end of 1991, the money and the oil. Both stopped. And within months, his government fell. Rival warlords tore the country apart, and out of that disorder in 1994, the Taliban emerged, taking the capital in 1996 and giving Osama bin Laden the safe haven where he built September 11th. Now the control Z timeline. Since the Soviet Union doesn't collapse at the end of 1991, the pipeline never gets cut. Moscow keeps propping up its man in Kabul. A friendly government on its southern border is cheap insurance against exactly the Islamic radicalism stirring in its own Central Asian republics. Najibullah, or someone like him, holds on. The country never collapses into civil war, so the Taliban never takes power. And without the Taliban, bin Laden never gets his Afghan sanctuary. Now let me be clear. Osama bin Laden is still out there in this timeline. Al-Qaeda still forms and terrorism is still a threat. But the attack on New York and Washington, DC needed that Afghan base. And that base never gets built. So without it, 9-11 doesn't happen. But the rage doesn't evaporate. It just finds a different target. Ask who the great enemy of radical Islam really is in this timeline. The Americans are an ocean away. Occupying nobody. The Soviet Union is right there, ruling 50 million Muslims across Central Asia, holding down the Caucasus, and propping up the government in Kabul. The Holy War has a near enemy now, a communist, officially atheist state occupying Muslim land directly. So the great terrorist catastrophe of this century is a Russian one. It happens in Moscow. And we know what that looks like, because our own timeline ran the experiment. When Russia fought its Muslim population in Chechnya, it got the Moscow apartment bombings, it got the theater siege, it got a school in Beslan where more than 300 people died, most of them children. Now multiply that across an empire holding far more Muslim land by force for decades. The Soviet Union survives, but it pays for that occupation with a tax on its own cities. That's the war that never happens, but there's another one. The Iraq War, the 2003 version, the one that defined a generation of American foreign policy, cost trillions of dollars, took hundreds of thousands of lives, and broke the Middle East wide open. That war was only possible because the United States was the only superpower left. The whole idea under it was that America could now do anything it wanted anywhere alone because nobody was left to stop it. There was a phrase for it in the 1990s. They called it the unipolar moment. One superpower, no rival, free to act anywhere it wanted. That 2003 invasion was that freedom in action. Take that away. Here there is no unipolar moment. There are still two poles. And the second one, the Soviet Union, was Iraq's old patron. America rolling into a Soviet client state alone, with a hostile superpower watching and a live alliance ready to answer? A president who tries that is gambling with World War III and he knows it. So he doesn't. The American habit of the 90s and 2000s, reaching into countries to remove governments it didn't like, never develops because the thing that allowed it, having no rival, never happens. Saddam Hussein dies in his bed, an old tyrant still in power, still propped up by Moscow. Those are the wars America starts, but the ones it joins flip as well. In the 1990s, when Yugoslavia tore itself apart, America and NATO eventually waded in, bombing the Serbs to save first Bosnia and then Kosovo. They could do it because Russia, Serbia's traditional protector, was far too weak to object. Here, the Soviet Union is not too weak to object. It backs Belgrade the way it always had, and a NATO bombing a Soviet ally becomes the superpower confrontation nobody wants. The Balkans don't get the Western rescue they got in our world. They become another Cold War flashpoint with two nuclear powers backing opposite sides of the same war. And the American military itself ends up built differently. In our timeline, 9-11 turned the most powerful army on earth into a counterinsurgency force, a generation of soldiers learning to hunt guerrillas in Baghdad and Kandahar. But none of that happens here. No 9 11 set it off, and there's no Iraq to go fight. The American military stays what it was built to be a heavy conventional and nuclear force still positioned for one enemy the Soviet Union. Now jump to the present, to 2026, and what this timeline actually produces. We'll start with the name that's been in the headlines for 25 years now. There is no Vladimir Putin. Well, not the one that you know at least. If you trace his actual rise, it runs entirely through the wreckage of the collapsed Soviet Union. He resigns from the KGB. He becomes a deputy mayor in St. Petersburg under a Democratic reformer. He climbs onto Boris Yeltsin's staff in the new Russia, and Yeltsin, hunting for a successor, hands him the country in 1999. Every one of those moves depended on the collapse. Without it, none of it happens here. Here in the Ctrl-Z timeline, Putin is a competent mid-level KGB officer who retires on a decent pension to a quiet dacha, and you never learn his name. And the surviving Soviet Union. Has no single strong man at the top. Power stays with the institution that ran the crackdown. The security services passing control from one gray KGB man to the next for 35 years. Then there's the war that has filled your TV screen for the last few years. It's not there either, because there is no independent Ukraine. This might be the cleanest erasure in this entire timeline. The crackdown in the spring of 1991 lands before Ukraine can vote for independence, and the movement is crushed before it can get anywhere. So Ukraine never leaves. It stays a Soviet republic held down by force. And everything that came out of an independent Ukraine never happens. There's no Orange Revolution in 2004 because there's no free country to have one. There's no pro-Western uprising in 2014. No my dan. Russia never annexes Crimea because you don't annex a peninsula you already own. And the full scale invasion of twenty twenty two, the biggest land war in Europe since Hitler, the one that's killed hundreds of thousands, the one that we've all been watching grind on for years, that war doesn't exist because it can't. The two nations fighting it are here, one and the same. What you get instead Is quieter and grimmer. That western region, Galicia, the most stubborn anti-Soviet ground in the Union, becomes a permanent occupation. The Soviet army fights a grinding, low-level war against its own citizens and the countryside around Lviv for decades, and nobody outside the country pays much attention. The fighting never ends in a place that still never accepted Soviet rule. So if the Soviet Union is surviving but And America is stuck on permanent guard duty. Who actually comes out ahead here? Who wins? The answer is China, and it comes out further ahead than it ever did in our world. Think about why America reached out to China in the first place. It started in the 1970s under Nixon for one cold reason to use China as a counterweight against the Soviet Union. The enemy of my enemy, etc. In our timeline, the Soviet Union vanished, that logic faded, and that relationship gradually became a rivalry. Here, the Soviet Union never vanishes, so that logic never fades. America needs China as a partner against the surviving Soviet Union, and it spends decades courting Beijing, opening its markets, and pouring in money and technology to keep China on its side. And China takes all of it. It plays the two rivals against each other and gets rich doing it. The one major power the standoff never drained. So picture the world of 2026 as a triangle. Three great powers, none able to knock the other two down. A wealthy, dominant China, a broke but heavily armed Soviet Union. And an America that never got to be the planet's only superpower. Never got its unipolar moment, locked in a draining standoff for 80 unbroken years. The country that spilled the least blood and came out the richest is the one that sat the fight out. And the map of 2026 has a hard dividing line that ours doesn't. An iron curtain is still in place, pushed even further east than the one your grandparents or great-grandparents knew. Free Europe on one side. The Soviet Empire on the other. And Poland, Hungary, and the Czechs trapped in the gap. Free since 1989, but never safe, never invited into the Western club. Just a tense buffer zone between two heavily armed blocks. The Cold War your grandparents were sure ended in 1991 is here, still running, deep into its eighth decade. And nobody alive can quote. quite remember a world without it. Outside of Russia, history has been generous to Mikhail Gorbachev. He won the Nobel Prize in 1990. The world remembers him as the man who ended the Cold War and let Eastern Europe go free. But in his own country, the verdict is the reverse. In Russia, they say his name like a curse. They remember him as the man who lost, the weak one, the leader who held the greatest empire on earth in his two hands and let it crumble away. Too soft, too hesitant, too desperate for the West's approval to do what holding on would have taken. This whole episode is the answer to them. Because we just spent an entire episode watching what holding on would have taken. We watched him make the strong choice, the decisive one, the move they swear he was too weak to make. We watched him plant his feet, turn the army loose, and keep the empire whole. But look at the Bill. It runs to the freedom of half of Europe, locked back in its cage for another 35 years. It runs to Ukraine, erased before it was ever born. It runs to the Baltic peoples, swallowed for good. It runs to Cuba and North Korea, handed their captivity instead of their famines, which is its own kind of cruelty. It runs to the whole planet, split down the middle along a second cold war with no ending. in an arms race with no final lap. And the heaviest line falls on the Russian people themselves, who don't get rich, who don't get free in any way that matters, who get to stand guard over a poorer, grayer, more frightened prison year after year after year. That's what the strong choice was always going to cost. So maybe the verdict at home has been upside down from the start. What they blame him for The flinching, the refusal to drown the republics in blood, the opening of his hand. Russia has filed this under failure for 35 years. It was the single most consequential act of mercy of the modern age. His weakness, the exact quality his countrymen despise him for, is why the Cold War ended. It's why the Berlin Wall stayed down. It's why hundreds of millions of people walked out of that empire and into lives. For better or worse, that were finally their own. He had the gun in his hand. Three times he had already pulled the trigger. And at the very end, with everything he'd ever wanted in the balance, he set it down. This free, ragged, incredibly imperfect world that we live in is the one that single refusal built. He gave it to us. And his own country. I spent 35 years thanking him by calling it his failure. Decisions don't get do-overs, but on this show they do. If you like the show, please rate and subscribe wherever you happen to be listening. It helps other people find it and allows me to understand whether people actually enjoy it. Until next time, I'm Kevin Perez Allen. Thanks for hitting Ctrl Z with me.