the Moldovan government routinely declared the organization of such referendums illegal and routinely nullified the results.<ref>The first referendums were organized in Rîbnița and Tiraspol in December 1989 and January 1990 respectively. This was followed by Tighina several months later in the spring. During the course of July, August and September, many Transnistrian city, raion, town (poselkovye) and rural (sel'skie) soviets conducted referendums of their own. By October, some were holding referendums again. While many of the referendums included questions on other important debates relevant to the various cities, one question was on every ballot in every referendum: "On entry into the [Dniester state] in the event of its creation." See: "Vybory, referendumy, oprosy," in Nepriznannaia respublika," Gryzlov, ed., Vol. II, 175-179.</ref> On September 2, 1990, in the face of the Moldovan declaration of sovereignty from the Soviet Union and with a growing mandate from the referendum campaign sweeping the Dniester region, delegates to the Second Congress of Transnistrian Deputies announced the creation of the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic. With the declaration of the PMSSR, city and raion soviets throughout Transnistria convened plenums and discussed the possibility of integrating themselves into the new republic. While many of the soviet deputies were those same delegates that participated in the Second Congress, these votes were not always uncontested affairs; in the case of the Dubossary raion, the soviet refused to place itself under the jurisdiction of the Dniester state. In the Dubossary city soviet, an organ with OSTK preponderance but not dominance, the majority prevailed with the support of only 49 of the 86 deputies (57%). While results were more one sided elsewhere, everywhere confusion abounded. Many governmental institutions—the police, public prosecutors, judges—remained loyal to the government in Chișinău; some enterprises or villages defected from one local soviet to another to end up on the right side; paramilitary men competed with police to provide law and order, and during 1991 began attempting to evict them from their former stations. Even in Tiraspol, consolidation was to take upwards of a year. Opposition to PMSSR While the PMSSR was popular in Transnistria's cities, there was considerable opposition in rural communities. While OSTK supporters took control of city soviets in 1990, this was not the case in most of the raion soviets with their agricultural constituencies. The new leadership of the Grigoriopol raion soviet did not support the separatist movement and the new Dubossary and