On 17th March 1991, people of the Soviet Union voted to keep the existing Soviet Union in a slightly changed form. The Baltic States (Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia), Armenia, Georgia and Moldova boycotted the voting. In each of the other nine "republics" of the Soviet Union, a majority of the voters supported the retention of the Soviet Union. In June 1991 an election took place in the Russian Republic of the Soviet Union. Boris Yeltsin got 57% of the vote. He was a critic of Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev’s preferred candidate, former Premier Nikolai Ryzhkov, got only 16% of the vote.