--- andie nachgeborenen <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > As living standards` improved through the mid-80s,
> the
> overall legitimacy of the regime was enhanced. It
> only
> started to fall precipitously when the nomenklatura
> defected from the idea of the USSR and socialism in
> the later years of perestroika, and even then a poll
> done shortly before the breakup showed that 75% +/-
> of
> the whole Soviet population favored keeping the
> country together.
74.8% of the population who voted in the referendum, according to the official count, if memory serves. However it should be noted that a number of republics abstained -- the Baltic States and (I believe) Georgia, there may have been a couple more, I don't remember.
Keep in mind that the vote concerned retaining the Soviet Union, not the Soviet system (by this, understand the Brezhnev-era system).
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