Gonna do a repost of a repost.

From a previous answer I wrote:

The referendum in question was held on March 17, 1991, and was worded as follows:

Считаете ли Вы необходимым сохранение Союза Советских Социалистических Республик как обновлённой федерации равноправных суверенных республик, в которой будут в полной мере гарантироваться права и свободы человека любой национальности?

Which can be translated to English as:

"Do you consider necessary the preservation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as a renewed federation of equal sovereign republics in which the rights and freedom of an individual of any ethnicity will be fully guaranteed?"

A couple things of note: the referendum was not held in six of the fifteen republics (Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Moldova, Georgia and Armenia). All of these except Armenia had basically elected non-communist governments in republican elections the previous year, and Lithuania had even declared independence in March 1990. Latvia and Estonia held referenda endorsing independence two weeks before the Soviet referendum, and Georgia held a similar referendum two weeks after. So even holding the vote was a fractured, not Union-wide affair.

It's also important to note the language of the referendum was for a renewed federation of equal sovereign republics. This may sound like a platitude, but effectively what it means is "do you support President Gorbachev renegotiating a new union treaty to replace the 1922 USSR Treaty?"

The background here is that after the end of the Communist Party's Constitutional monopoly on power and subsequent republican elections in 1990, the Soviet Socialist Republics, even those controlled by the Communist Party cadres, began a so-called "war of laws" with the Soviet federal government, with almost all republics declaring "sovereignty". This was essentially a move not so much at complete independence but as part of a political bid to renegotiate powers between the center and the republics.

Gorbachev in turn agreed to this renegotiation, and began the so-called "Novo-Ogaryovo Process", whereby Soviet representatives and those of nine republics (ie, not the ones who boycotted the referendum) met from January to April 1991 to hash out a treaty for a new, more decentralized federation to replace the USSR (the proposed "Union of Soviet Sovereign Republics" is best understood as something that was kinda-sorta maybe like what the EU has become, in terms of it being a collection of sovereign states that had a common presidency, foreign policy and military). Even the passage of the referendum in the participating nine republics wasn't exactly an unqualified success: Russia and Ukraine saw more than a quarter of voters reject the proposal, and Ukraine explicitly added wording to the referendum within its borders that terms for the renegotiated treaty would be based on the Ukrainian Declaration of State Sovereignty, which stated that Ukrainian law could nullify Soviet law.

That second question, presented to Ukrainian voters, was worded:

"Do you agree that Ukraine should be part of a Union of Soviet Sovereign States on the basis on the Declaration of State Sovereignty of Ukraine?"

And interestingly it got more yes votes than the first Union-wide question - the OP figures are actually for the second question, while the first question got 22,110,889 votes, or 71.48%.

In any event, the treaty was signed by the negotiating representatives on April 23, and went out to the participating republics for ratification (Ukraine's legislature refused to ratify), and a formal adoption ceremony for the new treaty was scheduled to take place on August 20.

That never happened, because members of Gorbachev's own government launched a coup the previous day in order to prevent the implementation of the new treaty. The coup fizzled out after two days, but when Gorbachev returned to Moscow from house arrest in Crimea, he had severely diminished power, and Russian President Boris Yeltsin (who publicly resisted the coup plot) had vastly increased power, banning the Communist Party on Russian territory, confiscating its assets, and pushing Gorbachev to appoint Yeltsin picks for Soviet governmental positions.