Glasnost

   Glasnost (openness, transparency) was an effort by Communist Party General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev to use information about Soviet history, as well as current political, social, and economic conditions, to modernize the Soviet Union and build a political base. Glasnost began after the Chernobyl nuclear reactor disaster in April 1986. The unwillingness of the Soviet bureaucracy to inform the Soviet people of the scope of the disaster until 10 days afterward convinced Gorbachev that radical change was necessary. Critical to the campaign was a reexamination of the crimes of the Stalin era. History was rewritten, some archives were opened, and hundreds of thousands of the Stalin’s victims were rehabilitated. Glasnost allowed Soviet citizens a much more honest—though hardly complete—account of the past. It also led to demands for greater freedoms, the establishment of an independent press, and a full accounting of the crimes of the Stalin period. However, glasnost also enraged the more reactionary members of the Communist Party, who believed that Gorbachev’s policy would destroy the political authority of the party and the KGB. Glasnost, in the opinion of many historians, was indirectly responsible for the rise of Russian reformer Boris Yeltsin. Yeltsin and his supporters saw information as a key weapon in the struggle for political power. They supported new journals such as Argumenty i Fakhti (Arguments and Facts), Literaturnaya Gazeta (Literary Journal), and Ogonek (The Little Fire) that researched the Soviet past and pushed the envelope in the debate on Soviet politics.