“We need glasnost without any shades, and criticism that does not exclude self-criticism.” Mikhail Gorbachev’s formula, delivered to the 27th Party Congress in February 1986, named the policy of openness that would dismantle the Soviet state’s monopoly on information. Glasnost — Russian for “openness” or “publicity,” a word with a long nineteenth-century pre-history — was, by 1990, a process that no one controlled. Soviet citizens were reading accounts of Stalin’s terror, watching debates of the Congress of People’s Deputies, and discussing politics in ways that would have led to arrest a decade earlier.
The change is now hard to overstate. It was, in the early stages, a policy of the leadership. By the late 1980s it had become a process that no one controlled. The historian Archie Brown, in The Gorbachev Factor (1996), treats glasnost as the more important of the two reforms; perestroika’s economic changes could be reversed, Brown’s argument runs, but the new information environment could not.
What Glasnost Changed
Three broad categories of activity were affected. The first was the press. Pravda and Izvestia, the official newspapers, had been required to publish a fixed proportion of approved material; they could now commission critical reporting. Ogonyok (Little Flame), a weekly newsmagazine under the editorship of Vitaly Korotich, became the most-watched publication of the late 1980s. The literary journal Novy Mir serialized Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago in 1989. The investigative reporter Aleksandr Ginzburg founded a cooperative newsletter in 1987 to publish information the official press would not touch.
The second was broadcasting. Vzglyad (View), a weekly youth program on Central Television that began in October 1987, became a national phenomenon by showing what had not been shown: alcoholism, drug use, pollution, the war in Afghanistan. The audience figures exceeded 100 million. The state could still intervene; the program was taken off the air in 1990 after a controversial broadcast, then brought back. By that point the precedent was established.
The third was history. The system had been built on a controlled version of the past; glasnost made the controlled version untenable. The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939 was now discussed, with the secret protocol dividing Eastern Europe into Nazi and Soviet spheres. The scale of Stalin’s terror became public: roughly 700,000 executed in the Great Purge of 1937–38, several million sent to the camps, a deliberate famine in the early 1930s that killed perhaps 3–5 million Ukrainians. Andrei Sakharov, the physicist and dissident, returned from internal exile in Gor’kii in December 1986; his first post-return press conference, on the balcony of his wife’s apartment, was a defining image of the late 1980s.
How the Policy Emerged
Gorbachev’s first use of the word was in a speech to a closed audience of media managers in May 1985. The public unveiling came in his address to the 27th Party Congress in February 1986: “We need glasnost without any shades, and criticism that does not exclude self-criticism.” The policy evolved rapidly over the next three years. The 1986 Law on Censorship abolished the pre-publication approval system in its strictest form, though enforcement was gradual. The 1988 party conference institutionalized competitive elections and a free press. The 1990 Law on the Press and Mass Media repealed all forms of prior censorship.
Two dynamics drove the escalation. The first was the new information technology. The photocopier, the audio cassette, the VCR, and later the personal computer made the old monopoly on information physically impossible to maintain. The second was the new generation of readers and listeners, who had been formed by the partial thaw of the Khrushchev years and were now demanding a fuller one. The new Soviet public, in the phrase that became common in 1988–89, was “listening to itself.”
What Glasnost Did to Politics
The effects on the political system were corrosive in ways the reformers did not fully appreciate. Three changes mattered most. The first was the recovery of dissent. Sakharov was a symbol; the more consequential cases were the dozens of political prisoners released between 1986 and 1989, the samizdat journals that could now be openly published, the demonstrations that could now be reported on. The second was the collapse of official ideology. The party had ruled in the name of a historical narrative that glasnost systematically dismantled. The third was the rise of nationalism. The Baltic republics, the Caucasus, and Ukraine each had versions of their own history that did not match the official Soviet one. Glasnost allowed those versions to be published, and they turned out to have a wider audience than anyone had expected.
The political consequences were also unpredictable. Yeltsin’s election to the Congress of People’s Deputies in March 1989 — 89 percent of the Moscow vote — was the most vivid example. The policy of openness had produced a result that the party leadership did not want, but could not reverse. By 1990, as the politologist Stephen White later wrote, “glasnost had become a system that could not be controlled by any single institution, including the one that had created it.”
The Limits of Glasnost
The policy had its limits, and they were tested. The 1989 miners’ strikes produced a temporary crackdown in the coal regions. Vzglyad was taken off the air in 1990 after broadcasting a critical survey of the Soviet Union’s new post–World War II borders. The Baltic republics found that the same Glasnost-era press that could discuss the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact could also be brought to bear against Baltic independence movements. The line between critical reporting and outright hostile propaganda was, in practice, drawn by the political sympathies of the editors. By 1990–91 the Soviet press was not so much free as politically polarized — a different problem, but a real one.
Why It Mattered
Glasnost mattered because the Soviet system depended on information control. The party claimed to represent the working class; it could not survive the working class learning what the party had done in its name. The party claimed to lead a multinational state founded on the voluntary union of 1922; it could not survive the publication of the Molotov–Ribbentrop protocol or the testimony of those who had been deported. The party claimed to defend peace and security; it could not survive the public discussion of the war in Afghanistan, the shooting of demonstrators in Tbilisi in April 1989, or the January 1991 Baltic crackdowns.
Gorbachev had set out to make the system honest so that it could be fixed. He ended up making the system honest, period. The fixing was a separate problem, and it did not get solved.