Article 6 of the Soviet Constitution

History

The party's leading role was not new with Article 6. Article 126 of the 1936 Constitution (adopted 5 December 1936, the 'Stalin Constitution') called the CPSU the vanguard of the working people and 'the leading core of all organizations of the working people, both public and state.' The 1924 Constitution did not mention the party at all. The 1977 Constitution was adopted by the USSR Supreme Soviet on 7 October 1977 and became known as the 'constitution of developed socialism.'

Under glasnost, perestroika and demokratizatsiya in the late 1980s, interest groups and proto-parties organised and pressure grew to revoke Article 6. The III Congress of People's Deputies, held 12 to 15 March 1990, amended the article with Gorbachev's acquiescence, deleting the leading-role wording and the ban on competing parties, and the same amendments created the office of President of the USSR (with a Vice-President added from 27 December 1990). The amended article said the CPSU, other political parties, and labour, youth and other public organisations and mass movements take part in shaping state policy and running state and public affairs through representatives elected to the Councils of People's Deputies and in other forms; Article 7 was amended to require all parties to operate by law and Article 51 to guarantee the right to unite in political parties. After the amendment the CPSU effectively lost its right to run the government apparatus.

The date of the amendment is documented inconsistently. Russian-language sources and accounts of the III Congress give 14 March 1990 for the amending law, while the English Wikipedia article on Article 6 gives 15 March 1990, the day Gorbachev was elected president. One encyclopaedia entry loosely dates it to February 1990.

Examples

Constitutional leading-role clauses were common to communist states. The Chinese constitution states that the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party is the defining feature of socialism with Chinese characteristics. Where other parties nominally existed, as in East Germany's National Front dominated by the SED, they were largely subservient and required to accept the Communists' leading role. Within a year of the Article 6 amendment more than one hundred political parties registered, a proliferation that proved problematic as reformers sought stable democratic institutions.

Distinctions

The amended Article 6 introduced a multi-party system but still retained mention of the CPSU, which allows the resulting political order to be characterised as a system with a dominant party rather than a fully neutral multi-party order. The March 1990 amendments also legalised private property (restating Article 10 around citizens' property and state property) and introduced the office of President of the USSR, so the repeal of Article 6 came as part of a broader restructuring of the economy and the state.