Article Six of the Soviet Constitution

Article Six of the Soviet Constitution is identified in the book as the constitutional basis of single-party rule. During the funeral procession for Andrei Sakharov, signs marked with a crossed-out six gave the provision a striking public meaning: demonstrators were calling for its deletion and for a political system with multiple parties. The episode shows how a constitutional article could become both a shorthand for the existing order and a focal point for opposition to it.

The Article and the Funeral

Sakharov’s death was presented on Soviet television as a moment of national mourning. The coverage included extravagant comparisons of the exiled physicist and dissident to figures such as Gandhi and Einstein. Yet the political significance of the funeral emerged not just from official commentary but from the crowd itself. Several hundred thousand people followed the procession through Moscow, an unprecedented spontaneous gathering in the country’s history.

Boris Yeltsin walked behind the coffin alongside Sakharov’s wife, Yelena Bonner. Yeltsin had already established himself as a leader of the democrats by noisily resigning from the Politburo. In the procession, the signs bearing a crossed-out six connected the public demonstration to a precise constitutional demand: the removal of Article Six and the single-party rule it represented.

A Constitutional Demand Made Legible

Raya noticed the signs and asked her son what the sixes meant. He explained that the demonstrators wanted to delete the constitutional article that established single-party rule, and that they wanted multiple parties, as in France. The exchange translates a technical provision into a plain political alternative: continued monopoly by one party, or a system in which more than one party could exist.

The symbol mattered because it made that alternative immediately legible within a vast crowd. Rather than merely opposing a leader or a policy, the crossed-out number pointed to the constitutional arrangement that upheld the existing political order. The scene records a public challenge to that arrangement, not evidence that the demand had already been enacted.

Raya’s Reaction and the Limits of Familiarity

Raya looked at her son in horror. For her, the prospect of multiple parties seemed as barbarous as making people pay for their gas. Her response sets the demonstrators’ proposal against a worldview in which the political monopoly was familiar enough to seem natural, while pluralism appeared alien and threatening.

The contrast gives Article Six a social meaning beyond its formal role: the same change could appear to one generation as a necessary opening and to another as an unsettling rupture. The funeral scene therefore presents the article at a point of contest. A mass procession and a small exchange between mother and son reveal how a demand for constitutional change could be visible in the streets yet remain difficult to imagine within ordinary habits of thought.