Tajikistan. During 1957–58 Nikita Khrushchev's Virgin Lands Campaign focused attention on Tajikistan, where living conditions, education and industry lagged behind the other Soviet Republics. In the 1980s, Tajikistan had the lowest household saving rate in the USSR, the lowest percentage of households in the two top per capita income groups, and the lowest rate of university graduates per 1000 people. By the late 1980s Tajik nationalists were calling for increased rights. Real disturbances did not occur within the republic until 1990. The following year, the Soviet Union collapsed, and Tajikistan declared its independence on 9 September 1991, a day which is now celebrated as the country's Independence Day. Independence After the beginning of the Perestroika era, declared by Mikhail Gorbachev throughout the USSR, supporters of the independence of the republics began to speak openly and freely. In Tajikistan SSR, the independence movement had been active since 1987. Supporters of independence were the Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan, the Democratic Party of Tajikistan and the national democratic Rastokhez (Revival) Movement. On the eve of the collapse of the USSR, the population of Tajikistan SSR was divided into two camps. The first wanted independence for Tajikistan, the restoration of Tajik culture and language, the restoration of political and cultural relations with Iran and Afghanistan and other countries, and the second part of the population opposed independence, considering it the best option to remain part of the USSR. During the 1991 Soviet Union Referendum (the first internationally observed referendum in the country's history) on continuing the Soviet system and the Soviet Union itself, nearly 97% of voters in Tajikistan approved of Question 1: "Do you consider it necessary to preserve the USSR as a renewed federation of equal sovereign republics, which will be fully ensured of human rights and freedoms of any nationality?", though by dissolution in December of the same year, a significant proportion of Tajikistan's population supported what was by then the fait accompli of independence for the union-level republics of the Soviet Union. In February 1990, riots and strikes in Dushanbe and other cities began due to the difficult socio-economic situation, lack of housing, and youth unemployment. The nationalist and democratic opposition and supporters of independence joined the strikes and began to demand the independence of the republic and democratic reforms. Islamists also began to hold strikes to demand respect for their rights and independence of the republic. The Soviet