Yes, that's all a reasonable assessment - it was frankly unimaginable that any of the republics could have safely walked away (or might even have wanted to) even as late as the late 1980s. But what I am talking about was the fatal crack in a disintegrating wall. Once it became obvious that the whole thing was falling apart - and this became obvious within a matter of days in the summer of 1991, which is what makes it all so astonishing - the legal fiction of Republican independence, which had been embedded in the Soviet system in 1918 but which had been thoroughly ignored ever since - suddenly became the vehicle that the republics used to head for the exits. Some of them did it for what we in the West would consider proper romantic revolutionary reasons - such as the Baltics and to some extent the Ukraine - while others, like Belorussia and all of the Central Asian Republics, did it for cynical reasons. They were in the hands of neo-Stalinist strongmen who quickly realized that they had a rare opportunity to be the Big Man in a small country instead of having to answer to the former Big Men in Moscow. But the fact is, whatever their motivation, they faced a largely forgotten and impossible to use escape valve that suddenly opened. And they had functioning provincial governments that made it at least marginally practical. China has learned this lesson and allows relatively little power to local governments (and has made sure the Army shows its teeth once in a while to keep everyone in line). I think Putin has learned this lesson too; it likely isn't an accident that he sharply curtailed the power of regional governors and governments and made them more dependent on Moscow. He wouldn't want anyone trying to take advantage of a future crisis to try to head for the exits of the Russian Federation either.