Glasnost

Where did the word come from?

Glasnost, Russian for openness or publicity, was no invention of Gorbachev's but an old word. In the reform era of Alexander II it demanded open courts and administration, and in Soviet times the dissident movement inherited it: the slogan of the December 1965 demonstration on Pushkin Square before the trial of the writers Sinyavsky and Daniel was precisely a demand for the glasnost of the trial. A word that belonged at once to the state's language and to the language of its critics was taken up, after 1985, by the party's own General Secretary as a banner of reform.

What was it a tool for?

In its early phase glasnost was an instrument of rule. Judging that without open exposure of problems the bureaucracy's resistance could not be overcome nor popular support organised, the leadership allowed the press to treat economic failure, official corruption and environmental damage so as to build pressure for reform. It was less the abolition of censorship than a change of its direction.

Chernobyl in April 1986 was the turning point: the early suppression of information cost such trust at home and abroad that concealment could no longer serve as a technique of government. As Yakovlev replaced the editors of major papers and journals with reformers, outlets like Ogonyok and Moscow News became openness's forward positions.

How did it become a flood?

The greatest shock came from history. From 1987 the documents and testimony of the Terror, collectivisation and famine came into the open; forbidden books held in special repositories were released; Bukharin and other former oppositionists were rehabilitated. Abuladze's film Repentance faced the Stalin era directly, and the thick journals printed works held back for decades, Doctor Zhivago, Requiem, Grossman's Life and Fate, their circulations leaping by millions, while live television programmes broke taboo after taboo.

There were battles over the boundary. The conservative counterattack behind Nina Andreyeva's letter froze the country for three weeks in March 1988, but Pravda's rebuttal carried the day and glasnost accelerated instead. The live broadcast of the 1989 Congress of People's Deputies was the culmination: the whole country stopped work to watch the powerful being questioned in public.

How far did it go?

Criticism did not stop at the Stalin era. As the system's own founding came into question, the Lenin years and the nature of the October Revolution entered open debate, and facts the state had denied for decades, the secret protocols of the 1939 pact, the Katyn massacre, were officially admitted. The jamming of foreign broadcasts ceased, and the press law of June 1990 wrote the abolition of censorship into statute. A policy introduced as reform's instrument had opened the way to effectively unlimited freedom of the press, and beyond it to the archival openings after 1991.

How is it judged?

Glasnost is counted the most fully realised strand of perestroika; Brown and others rate it Gorbachev's surest success. The opposing assessment stresses the price: with the economy delivering nothing, the publication of truth only ate at the system's legitimating narrative, and as people discovered one another's discontent, mobilisation and exit became possible at once. It is the paradox of a tool that swallowed its master.

Seen from within its own logic, glasnost was justified as the recovery of socialist democracy, a return to the tradition of open debate of the Lenin years, and Gorbachev said to the end that he did not regret it. What is certain is that the records and debates it left changed the very conditions of Soviet historiography, and that in the history of the Russian press it remains the origin of the free journalism of the 1990s and the point of contrast for the re-established controls of the 2000s.