he dark clouds began to lift after Mikhail Gorbachev was elected General Secretary of the Communist Party in 1985 and initiated the process of reforms that would be called Perestroika (after the Russian word for “reconstruction”). But not until December 1986 was Sakharov allowed to return to Moscow and resume his public activities. He helped to initiate the first independent legal political organizations of the intelligentsia, and became one of the most prominent figures in the Soviet Union’s growing political opposition. The new groups demanded democratic changes more radical than the Communist Party’s official line of modest reform. In April 1989 Sakharov was elected a member of the Soviet Union’s new parliament, the All-Union Congress of People’s Deputies, and there he was elected a co-leader of the democratic opposition faction.  

he democratic opposition demanded major concessions from the Communist Party, notably the abolition of the infamous Article 6 of the Constitution which proclaimed the party the ruling and guiding force of Soviet society. A principled defender of constitutional democracy, Sakharov started drafting a new Constitution. He argued that only quicker and more radical reform could guarantee the peaceful evolution of the country.