Mikhail Gorbachev hits CTRL+Z

August 19, 1991.

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 coup? Let's hit Control-Z.

Welcome to Control-Z Rewritten, 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.