1991 Soviet Union referendum

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 17th of March 1991, Soviet citizens across nine republics were handed a ballot with a question that had never before been put to a national vote: should the USSR survive? It was the only national referendum in the entire history of the Soviet Union, and the question it posed carried the weight of seven decades of socialist statehood. Would a federation that stretched across eleven time zones, encompassing dozens of ethnicities and fifteen republics, remake itself into something new? And if so, what would that mean for the people who already wanted out?

  Six republics had already decided not to participate. Their authorities boycotted the vote entirely. But the nine republics that did take part produced a striking result: nearly 80 percent of voters said yes, they wanted to preserve the Union. Yet within nine months, that Union would be dissolved anyway. What happened between that overwhelming "yes" and the quiet extinction of the Soviet state on the 26th of December 1991 is one of the strangest stories in modern political history.

• 2. The Question Itself

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  The wording on the ballot was not a simple yes-or-no on survival. Voters were asked whether they considered it necessary to preserve the USSR as a "renewed federation of equal sovereign republics" in which the rights and freedoms of people of any ethnicity would be fully guaranteed. That phrase, "renewed federation," was doing enormous work. It implied the old union was flawed, that something had to change, while still affirming that some kind of shared Soviet structure should persist.

  Kazakhstan made one telling adjustment: it substituted "equal sovereign states" for "equal sovereign republics." The distinction mattered. A state carries a different legal weight than a republic inside a federation. Uzbekistan, Ukraine, and Kirghizia went further, appending their own additional questions about sovereignty and independence alongside the union-wide question.

  The entire enterprise had its origins in the 4th Congress of People's Deputies, which voted on the 24th of December 1990 to hold the referendum. At the initiative of General Secretary and President Mikhail Gorbachev, the Congress passed resolutions that day covering both a referendum on private land ownership and one on preserving the Union. The Supreme Soviet followed on the 16th of January 1991, publishing Resolution 1910-1 that formally set the date and the ballot wording. The resolution stated plainly that no one except the people could take historical responsibility for the fate of the USSR.

• 3. The Boycott

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  Armenia, Estonia, Georgia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Moldova all refused to let the referendum proceed on their territory under official auspices. Their reasons were not mysterious: all six were moving toward independence, and participating would have implied acceptance of the Soviet framework they were trying to leave.

  But the boycott was not clean. In Georgia, the autonomous regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia held the vote anyway. In Moldova, the regions of Transnistria and Gagauzia did the same. These were territories with their own complicated relationships to their host republics, and the Soviet referendum gave them a stage. South Ossetia returned a result of 98.5 percent in favor of the union. Transnistria and Gagauzia produced similarly overwhelming yes votes.

  Lithuania had already held its own referendum on the 9th of February 1991, just five weeks before the Soviet vote. There, 93 percent of voters had approved independence. Estonia and Latvia both held their own votes on the 3rd of March 1991, with Estonia returning 77.8 percent in favor of restoring the republic that the Soviet Union had occupied in 1940. Latvia's result was described as an overwhelming majority for restoration of the independent Latvian republic. These countries were running a parallel process, and they had no interest in the Soviet timetable.

• 4. The Results

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  Across the nine participating republics, turnout reached 80 percent. Of those who voted, nearly 80 percent approved the question. These were not narrow margins. In Kazakhstan, the yes vote was particularly strong. In Uzbekistan, where an additional question on sovereignty was also on the ballot, that extra question passed with 94.9 percent approval on a turnout of 95.5 percent.

  In Ukraine, the result was more layered. The union question passed, but an additional question asking whether Ukraine should be part of a union of Soviet sovereign states based on its own Declaration of State Sovereignty was also approved, by 81.7 percent. Simultaneously, in the three Galician oblasts of Ivano-Frankivsk, Lviv, and Ternopil, a separate regional referendum asked about an independent Ukrainian state. There, 88 percent voted for independence. Eastern and western Ukraine were pointing in different directions.

  Russia added its own additional question: should an elected presidency be created for the Russian Republic? That question passed as well, a detail that would prove consequential. Boris Yeltsin would win that presidency in June 1991, giving Russia's leadership a democratic mandate that would compete directly with Gorbachev's authority.

  In Russia's oblasts and autonomous regions, the range of yes votes was notable. Moscow returned a yes vote of just over 50 percent, and Saint Petersburg came in at just over 50 percent as well. In Sverdlovsk, the yes vote was 49.33 percent. These cities and regions were less enthusiastic about preservation than the rest of the country. Overall, Russia's yes total came in at roughly 71 percent.

• 5. The August Coup and What Followed

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  The signing of the New Union Treaty, which would have given legal form to the referendum result, was scheduled for the day after hardliners in the Communist Party launched their coup attempt in August 1991. The timing was not accidental: the coup was an attempt to stop the treaty. The plotters failed. But the failure of the coup did not save Gorbachev's vision. It destroyed what was left of confidence in the central government he led.

  What followed was a cascade. One republic after another held its own independence referendum. Georgia and Armenia had already prepared theirs: both were held after the August coup, and in both cases, 99.5 percent of voters approved independence declarations. In Uzbekistan, a vote on the 29th of December produced 98 percent in favor of full independence, from the same electorate that had voted 94.9 percent in favor of staying in a renewed union months earlier.

  Ukraine's full independence referendum came on the 1st of December 1991. There, 92 percent voted for independence, a result that included substantial majorities even in regions that had supported the union in March. That vote made the dissolution of the USSR effectively irreversible. On the 26th of December 1991, the Soviet Union formally ceased to exist, less than nine months after 80 percent of voters in nine republics had said they wanted it preserved.