Glasnost
Glasnost
Glasnost is the Russian word for publicity, openness, the state of being public. It refers to a policy of openness in private and public discussions about social, economic, and cultural issues that was initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev after his ascension to the leadership of the Union of Soviet Socialistic Republics (USSR) in 1985. Gorbachev tried to use open public discussions about the state of the country to generate grassroots political support for his policy of economic restructuring (perestroika) and to outmaneuver his political opponents within the Communist Party. It could be argued that Gorbachev envisioned glasnost as a sort of compensation for the temporary economic hardship that his perestroika program of reforms unavoidably involved.
As a result of the glasnost policy, many sensitive historical issues, such as the brutality of the regime of Joseph Stalin (1879–1953), were acknowledged and the Soviet Union’s “official” history was rewritten. The policy also brought to public attention the economic stagnation in the country and permitted open criticism of government policies. It was one of the main aims of Gorbachev’s glasnost policy to make the state and its entrenched elites accountable to the public by revealing the real economic situation and by allowing the Soviet people to express their wishes. Glasnost destroyed the myth that everyone was happy under the Soviet Union and praised the country’s leadership, but the policy exposed many more fundamental problems than Gorbachev had expected.
It is generally believed that Gorbachev had planned to use the Leninist ideology to thoroughly reform the Soviet Union without destroying it. Nikita Khrushchev (1894–1971), an earlier Soviet leader, tried to reform the USSR using soft methods but was not successful, so Gorbachev may have thought that a policy like glasnost was his only chance to push the necessary economic reforms through. However, freedom of expression unleashed forces that Gorbachev could not control: The media started to aggressively criticize long-denied problems, especially the country’s poor quality of life; revelations about the horrors of the Stalin era undermined Soviet political elites; and Moscow’s grip on the Soviet republics weakened and nationalistic feelings revived. The rapid rise of nationalism and calls for independence in such places as Azerbaijan, Estonia, Georgia, Lithuania, Latvia, and Ukraine were important consequences of glasnost, which allowed and to some degree encouraged people to think about their sovereignty and independence. Thus, glasnost contributed to the eventual demise of the Soviet Union.
Glasnost achieved Gorbachev’s aim of giving people freedom of expression, which before then had been strictly prohibited in the Soviet Union, but undermined his other aims and resulted in the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Although Russia remains a relatively poor country, its citizens now have more freedom than at any other time in Russian and Soviet history. Glasnost also resulted in a renaissance in Soviet cultural and artistic life and in a revival of religion. Previously banned writers became widely read by the general public and new writers and artists emerged. Glasnost has also become one of the few Russian words commonly used in English, which shows the extent of its international influence.
SEE ALSO Brezhnev, Leonid; Cold War; Communism; Gorbachev, Mikhail; Gulags; Iron Curtain; Khrushchev, Nikita; Stalin, Joseph; Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Brown, Archie, Michael Kaser, and Gerald S. Smith, eds. 1994. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Russia and the Former Soviet Union. 2nd ed. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
Gilbert, Martin. 2002. The Routledge Atlas of Russian History. 3rd ed. London: Routledge.
Gorbachev, Mikhail. 1996. Memoirs. New York: Doubleday.
Gorbachev, Mikhail. 2000. On My Country and the World. Trans. George Shriver. New York: Columbia University Press.
Hewett, Ed A., and Victor H. Winston, eds. 1991. Milestones in Glasnost and Perestroika. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution.
Tarasulo, Isaac J., ed. 1992. Perils of Perestroika: Viewpoints from the Soviet Press, 1989–1991. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources.
Pavel Erochkine