ABSTRACT
In life, Andrei Sakharov had stood alone, a man seldom followed and frequently reviled in his own country; in death, he would rally an army of mourners. His funeral, in December 1989, would become a major political event. His burial would help bury the hegemony of the Communist Party. The funeral service took place in the parking lot of the Luzhniki sports complex. Both the official and unofficial burial rites had much in common: each had distinctly political overtones which mobilized tens of thousands of mourners; the dead man was eulogized as a martyr; the funeral itself became the occasion to outline a new political vision and to incite the mourners to follow it. The official ideology of paranoia invoked enemies on every side and the need for war, struggle, and sacrifice to achieve the ultimate triumph. And so the centrepiece of the Communist rites became the “martyr funeral.”.
