Political Memes

Why would 77% of 145 million votes on the 1991 Soviet Union Referendum voting to retain the USSR not matter? If the states decided to leave against the will of the people, is that not an anti-democratic measure?

First of all, the referendum wasn't to continue the USSR of the old, it was a referendum for essentially a new union. That new union was supposed to give other states a lot more autonomy. So the vote was actually for something very different to what the union had been up to Perestroika. Also that 77% didn't contain all of the union, The Baltic states, Moldova and few more states refused to participate in the voting. Baltic states in particular had their own referendums where people voted to secede from the union. Some of the states were already in the process of leaving and the rest decided to secede when the new union treaty fell through.

Like, if the supermajority of people wish to maintain the union, why is it justifiable for the states to go against that? I am probably missing something on that matter, which is why I am asking you.

I'm going to use this point to explain how the majority also doesn't represent everyone. There have been talks about Catalonia wanting to secede from Spain for decades now. I'm sure if someone polled Spain as a whole the majority would be against Catalonia seceding. However, the whole of Spain does not represent Catalonia. Catalans represent Catalonia and based on the 2021 vote 51% supported independence. It's likely that in the near-future we will see Catalonia pushing to secede from Spain. Would you consider that secession attempt unjust? I think if a certain culture wants to be independent then their decision to become independent is justified.

Do you have any suggestions for books or further reading? Statistics and wikipedia pages only paint a partial picture, after all, and if those are historical revisionism then I am curious what we can trust as historical fact. A lot of what you have said backs up what I have read, though, so I am curious what parts were embellished and which parts weren’t.

It's not that the statistics or wikipedia are inherently revisionist, it's that people often take those things and present them in a revisionist way. Like with the 77% wanting to stay in the union. The number isn't wrong, but it's presented to mean something else than what it was. Revisionist present it like every region in the union wanted the union to continue as it was. Except as I've already explained, that wasn't the case. It was only the parts of the union who agreed to vote and the vote was for a new union not the continuation of the old one.

As for books, I don't really have any books to suggest. Most of the books I've read in the past have been in my native language and as much as I checked they haven't been translated to English. That said I did come across this monograph that piqued my interest: "Soviet Postcolonial Studies: A View from the Western Borderlands". I don't have the capacity to get into it right away, because it seems like a hard read, but it will go into my backlog.