#Russia: Imperial Temptations

By Richard Lourie

Since 2011 marks the 20th anniversary of the Soviet collapse, there will inevitably be a spate of articles viewing those two decades from every possible vantage. In fact, they’ve already started. March 17 was the 20th anniversary of the only free referendum ever held in the Soviet Union.
Mikhail Gorbachev asked the populace whether they favored retaining the basic form of the U.S.S.R. as a union of sovereign republics. Some republics — the Baltic states and Georgia among them — refused to even take part. But of those that did, three-quarters favored retention of the union. The figures were highest in the Central Asian republics, whose support ranged from the high 80s (Kazakhstan 82 percent) to the high 90s (Turkmenistan 97.7 percent). The Baltic states knew they would be better off outside any version of the Soviet Union, whereas the Central Asian states seemed to anticipate misfortune if they were cut off from the Soviet economic grid.

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