On 17 March 1991, for the first time in the history of the Soviet Union, a nation-wide referendum was held in which the country's citizens were asked one single question: Did they wish to continue living in a unified state? From 185.6 million eligible voters, 148.6 million took part in the referendum and 76.4 percent of them expressed the wish to continue living in the Soviet Union, but in a renewed federation of equal and sovereign republics.

That, indisputably, was the voice of the people, the same "people" in whose name the Soviet Union had ostensibly been created in the first place.

Mikhail Gorbachev had wanted the referendum. It was an attempt to establish some kind of control over events that were moving too fast and in too many directions at once. Conflict had broken out between Azerbaijan and Armenia, people still remembered the bloody crushing of a demonstration in Tbilisi, Georgia in 1989, and Moscow's image had just taken another battering with the suppression of demonstrations in Vilnius, Lithuania and Riga, Latvia.

One year before, Gorbachev had become the first president of the Soviet Union, but that title did nothing to increase his authority. Boris Yeltsin, as the new leader of Russia, was only making Gorbachev's position even more shaky. In the past, the Soviet republics had grumbled about Russian domination. Now Yeltsin was changing the picture. Russia was just as much a victim of the Soviet system as everyone else and all grievances were to be laid at the feet of "the centre" - Gorbachev, his politburo and the central party apparatus.

The violence of Tbilisi and Vilnius was no solution. The world was watching, and Gorbachev was not a tyrant by nature. He was unwilling to enter history as yet another butcher. Thus he turned to the people, asked them what they wanted and sought their opinion on their own future. The answer seemed straightforward - the people wanted both continuity and change. They wanted to continue living in the country they had been born in, but they wanted that country to learn how to adapt.

Shortly after the referendum, in April 1991, the leaders of the different republics were invited to the presidential residence at Novo-Ogarevo for talks on the drawing up of a new union treaty. It soon became apparent that concessions would have to be made. The new union would not be a rigid and centralised federation, but something more flexible - a confederation. Upon reaching an agreement, a date was set for the signing of a new union treaty establishing a "union of sovereign states."

That treaty was to have been signed on 20 August, but events took a dramatic turn. Gorbachev went to his residence at Foros in the Crimea, while back in Moscow conservative forces led by KGB chairman Vladimir Kriuchkov declared a state of emergency, saying that the signature of the new treaty would sound the death knell for the Soviet Union.

For all their rhetoric, Kriuchkov and his allies managed only a rather half-hearted coup. Even the KGB proved not as united as expected when it came to acting. As it was, the attempted coup became the final blow which brought the Soviet Union tumbling down. The Novo-Ogarevo treaty was never signed and became just another of history's "what ifs."

Later, Kriuchkov and others said that they were only trying to ensure that the will of the people was respected. They pointed out that a majority of Soviet citizens had not wanted the collapse of the Soviet Union. They were correct - the results of the 1991 referendum were there to back them up. Another question though, is whether - and how - that collapse could have been avoided.

The Soviet national anthem begins with a definition of the Soviet Union as an "unbreakable union of freeborn republics." Back in the days of civil war and political confusion and chaos, it was hardly possible to organise a referendum like that of 1991. Countries such as Austria or Finland could be said to have freely joined the European Union, while the Norwegian people voted in a referendum not to join, but the same cannot be said of any former Soviet republic.

The Bolsheviks were not fond of referendums or other manifestations of the voice of the people. Their one experiment with democracy, the elections to the constituent assembly in 1918, ended with them losing to the Socialist Revolutionary party. Their reaction to that event set the tone for all future Bolshevik actions: Soldiers with bayonets ensured that the constituent assembly was soon forgotten.

The Soviet anthem goes on to describe these republics as having been "joined together for all time by great Rus [as it was called historically]." Emphasising the role of Russia is fair enough, as the Soviet Union was more or less the Tsarist empire in a new form, resurrected from the upheavals of 1917. In the wake of the February revolution in 1917, and the October revolution that followed it, the various constituent parts of the old Russian empire hastened to proclaim independence.

The Tsars had built what many called "the prison of peoples," and those different peoples welcomed the freedom that events in revolutionary Petrograd seemed to promise. Vladimir Lenin was a pragmatic man and accepted the loss of territory only because he knew he would eventually get it back. Russia once again began to gather in the surrounding lands, replacing "bourgeois" or "feudal" regimes with Soviet power.

In 1922, the Soviet Union - an old empire with a new ideology - was created. Most importantly, it had a new administrative structure that divided the country into republics and autonomous areas along ethnic lines. That particular idea of Lenin's was to become a time bomb seventy years later.

A "strong and united Soviet Union, created by the will of the people" can also be heard in the Soviet anthem. The problem was that "the people" was always a relative concept in Soviet terms, over-used and empty of substance. Some, of course, did sincerely and whole-heartedly believe that they were building a free new nation. But others were simply coerced and opposition was crushed. Ethnic and cultural identity was allowed, but only in measured doses. Too much ethnicity was called "bourgeois nationalism" and usually drew the attention of the KGB.

Successive Soviet constitutions gave the whole structure a veneer of free and equal association, but everyone knew that no republic could withdraw from the union, and that all real power was concentrated in Moscow. At a Moscow park formerly called the Exhibition of Economic Achievements, the "friendship of the peoples" fountain, meant to represent the former Soviet republics, stands as a sad reminder that ideals and reality are two different things.

The fountain was intended to symbolise harmony and unity in a nation bound by a common ideology. Many dreamed of a country resembling one big happy family - a place where different religions, languages and traditions would not stop people from being friends and neighbours, from living and working together, from building a common community.

The idea of the common home was taken up by Charles De Gaulle in his vision of a Europe that would include Russia. Gorbachev revived the idea when he began perestroika and extended a hand to the West. It has also been much used during the building of the European Union, and many people point out with irony in their tone that while the Soviet Union was falling apart, the nations of Europe were coming together.

But the European Union is closer to what the Soviet anthem eulogised - a freeborn union created by the will of the people. It arose out of a determination to build peace after having lived through the horror and destruction of two world wars. It came after a history marked by centuries of conflict, conquests, defeats and distrust. Its construction was never an easy process. On the surface, the nations of Western Europe may seem like a homogenous little group, but from within the situation is far more complex.

A union like that of the Western European nations was not something that could be decreed, but only formed as a genuinely free association, pieced together with careful thought and compromise. The initial impetus for the European Union was purely economic: Everything began with the Coal and Steel Community, as that was about all the different countries could agree upon back in the 1950s. The rest has been a gradual process, and it is only recently that the member states have begun to seriously contemplate such things as a common foreign policy, defence policy and social legislation.

The element of compromise and mutual respect that is the cement of the European Union was never present in the Soviet Union, and so the Soviet foundation was weak to begin with. When Gorbachev launched his perestroika, he did not imagine that it would trigger the collapse of the system and the entire Soviet Union. Despite the accusations of some of his detractors, it was not his intention to bury the system, but to reform it.

His plans proved an impossible task, because the system was beyond changing. Reforming a totalitarian society necessarily meant reforming the tangible forms that society took. What was more tangible than the Soviet Union itself?

Lenin was the architect of that Soviet home, and his design turned out to have too many inherent flaws. In the long run, he was not a good architect. That is the tragedy of those 76.4 percent of Soviet citizens who voted to keep their country intact on 17 March 1991: All they wanted was renovation, not demolition. But Lenin's house had never been built with referendums and reforms in mind.