Leon Aron on Glasnost at 20

From AEI's Russian Outlook:

On January 27, 1987, at the end of the first working day of the Central Committee meeting, the general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), Mikhail Gorbachev, strode to the podium and declared that the people should be given an opportunity to have “their say on any subject of the society’s life.”[1] From then on, he avowed, the “outside-criticism zones” of Soviet life were a thing of the past. “People must know the whole truth,” Gorbachev told the startled functionaries of the one-party dictatorship, which for seventy years had maintained total control of mass media, employing deafening and unchallenged propaganda, censorship, and terror to suppress the emergence and dissemination of independent thought. “As never before,” Gorbachev continued, “we need the Party and the people to know everything. [We need] [m]ore light!”[2]

To describe this new policy, Gorbachev used the nineteenth-century word “glasnost.” Derived from the old Russian word glas (voice), it had come to mean the ability to voice one’s concerns openly. Along with perestroika (reconstruction), it would soon enter all the major languages as a label for the mammoth transformation of the Soviet Union that was underway.

There were many perfectly valid tactical explanations for introducing glasnost. One of them was to avoid the fate of the previous reformist Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev (1954-64), who was overthrown by the party establishment. By quickly giving people a stake in the liberalization, Gorbachev dramatically expanded the political base of the reforms. The ploy succeeded brilliantly and made Gorbachev invulnerable to the party conservatives. Yet from its beginning as a tactic in the service of a reform, glasnost quickly evolved into the primary engine of a revolution that destroyed the political and economic systems--as well as the very state--that Gorbachev had intended to modify.