Glasnost Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

The campaign for glasnost (meaning “openness”) was the first sign that Mikhail Gorbachev, general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, was serious about reform. Gorbachev used the word in his first speech after he came to power in March 1985. The next year, finding his economic reforms blocked by party conservatives, Gorbachev encouraged the media, still subject to close state censorship, to more openly discuss social problems. He hoped this would pressure bureaucrats to embrace reform. However, intellectuals seized the opportunity to raise issues way beyond Gorbachev’s economic agenda, from the crimes of Joseph Stalin to the rights of national minorities.

Free speech initially took root in some intellectual journals, theatrical performances, and movies, and then spread to news magazines and eventually television. Pioneering editors, such as those at the weeklies Moscow News and Arguments and Facts, brought hitherto taboo topics into the public arena. By 1987 the elaborate system of state prepublication censorship had effectively collapsed.

August 1987 saw a wave of nationalist protests in Armenia and the Baltic republics, but Gorbachev refused to give in to conservative critics who were calling for a reversal of glasnost. On the contrary, he accelerated the pace of reform, introducing limited competitive elections in March 1989. A new June 1990 law on press freedom formally abolished censorship.

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