The Implementation of Glasnost and the Start of its Unintended Consequences

Before glasnost, the Soviet regime only allowed the Communist Party hierarchy to voice opinions through state-controlled media. Glasnost marked a transformation to this system: Gorbachev intended for glasnost to encourage open discussion of economic inefficiencies and bureaucratic corruption. He initially restricted discussion of Stalin’s past because he feared it would result in public disillusionment which would distract from his reforms. 

Starkly, there were three unexpected and fateful events that resulted in more liberalization from glasnost: the explosion of the Chernobyl nuclear plant, the January 1987 Plenum, and the 70th Anniversary of the October Revolution. In each of these events, state imposed constraints on glasnost backfired because of the public’s thirst for more freedom; the government faced significant pressure to reveal more information. As such, the state could not selectively manage its narrative. Even though Gorbachev tried to keep glasnost in controlled bounds, leaders were unable to contain the dormant fury roused by it. 

The first event was the Chernobyl explosion on April 26, 1986. The Soviet government initially tried to cover up the full scale of the explosion of the nuclear plant, in line with its traditional culture of secrecy. However, the story of Chernobyl was impossible for Moscow to contain as a result of Western monitoring technology and media. On April 27th, unmanned detectors in Sweden registered radioactive fallout coming from the Soviet Union; Western commercial satellites provided acute imagery of the disaster as early as April 28th. This rapid Western detection and news reportage made the talk of glasnost ring hollow. Western reports soon reached Soviet citizens through shortwave radio, which demonstrated the government’s lack of transparency in the face of the crisis. To enhance his credibility as a champion of government honesty, Gorbachev decided to expand the flow of information about Chernobyl. By May 10th, the media was allowed on scene to produce reports, which was a shift towards greater openness. While these actions intended to increase transparency, it opened the door to increased public criticism against the Soviet government. Chernobyl demonstrated the clandestine culture within the regime, which coalesced public discourse to push for increased government transparency in the face of public health crises. Indeed, Gorbachev was forced to leverage the Chernobyl incident as a means to expand the perimeter of glasnost. In his televised speech to the nation on May 14th, Gorbachev declared that the Chernobyl incident proved that the Soviet system needed restructuring—which historian Elliot describes as “a politically adroit seizure of victory from the clutches of disaster.”

Perhaps the most significant development and wholesale departure of glasnost was the January 1987 plenum. By 1987, Gorbachev realized that economic reforms were unable to address the Soviet Union’s economic stagnation; there needed to be structural political and ideological changes to accelerate the requisite restructuring. With a high level goal of democratization, the plenum took the firm decision to move towards contested elections and the creation of a new legislature to replace the existing Supreme Soviet. At this plenary session, Gorbachev gave the most far-reaching critique of Soviet theory. Gorbachev argued that political thinking had been “largely fixed at the level of the 1930s-40s [when] vigorous debates and creative ideas disappeared [...] while authoritarian evaluations and opinions became unquestionable truths.” After saying that the society and system were only at the initial stage of perestroika, he declared that “Perestroika itself is possible only through democracy and due to democracy. It is only in this way that it is possible to give scope to socialism’s most powerful creative force—free labour and free thought in a free country.” The plenum effectively opened up public discussion to every essential Marxist postulate, including collectivization, central planning, and party monopolization of cadre appointments. As such, the government signaled that they were willing to confront past mistakes and allow a broader range of viewpoints, which ominously opened the door to challenging the traditional Marxist-Leninist doctrine. As a result, radical statements circulated including Nikolai Shmelev’s essay on the bankruptcy of central planning, rapid growth of pressure for rehabilitating Stalin’s Old Bolshevik victims, and profusion of harsh attacks on water projects in many publications including Ogonyok, Novyi Mir, and Kommunist. While Gorbachev intended for glasnost as a tool for democratization within the framework of socialism, the people countered with a growing willingness to challenge the Communist Party. This set the stage for a proliferation of radical ideas that would soon challenge the Party’s authority and destabilize the Soviet Union, as opposed to revitalizing the nation. 

The spread of these unprecedented demands was further exacerbated by the 70th Anniversary of the October Revolution. As this event approached in 1987, Gorbachev recognized the need for glasnost in historical discussions. In a reversal of his earlier restraint, Gorbachev boldly took the gambit of arguing that history and literature should not have “forgotten names or blanks,” emphasizing that those who made the revolution should not be forgotten. In a speech about the October Revolution, Gorbachev tried to strike a compromise between radical calls for the rehabilitation of Bolsheviks repressed by Stalin and tributes to his wise leadership—a balance of the positive and negative aspects of Stalin’s rule. However, one of the most striking radical calls made was Gorbachev’s proclamation that Stalin’s repressions were “immense and unpardonable” and should serve as a lesson for “all generations.” Gorbachev initiated a new radical review of Soviet history that ultimately made people question the system that they so blindly followed for years. Speaking for many of his compatriots, an unnamed dumbfounded Russian citizen stated, “How could it happen that until I was thirty years old I had been living in comfortable ignorance that the entire post-October history of my people was mixed with blood, crime and lies? That the people whom I believed, whose portraits were encouragingly looking at me from the pages of school textbooks, whom I worshipped and considered to be disinterested fighters for the radiant future, turned out to be either criminals or maniacs. The system managed to turn me into an idiotic true believer.”

Glasnost became the fuel that ignited the chain reaction of the aforementioned three factors that undermined Communist Party authority, which in turn led to the eventual collapse of the USSR. Like any fire, where Gorbachev failed was preventing the spontaneous combustion caused by glasnost. Gorbachev should have launched what authoritarian regimes with great precedent do best: crack down. Two relatively recent precedents would have been instructive for Gorbachev to heed. In China in 1956, Mao instated the Hundred Flowers Campaign, allowing criticism of the CCP to improve governance and promoting intellectual freedom. The campaign backfired when widespread dissent began to proliferate, which resulted in Mao cracking down on dissent and codifying a political purge through the Anti-Rightist Campaign. Similarly, in Czechoslovakia’s Prague Spring reforms of 1968, the Czech government aimed to include greater freedoms of speech and political choice. Brezhnev saw these liberalization efforts of the Prague Spring as a threat to Soviet unity, which is why he instated a three-month détente period of reconnaissance, surveillance, and increased political pressure on the government to suppress the reforms. When the Prague Spring continued to grow in power, Brezhnev met with other Soviet nations on July 14, 1968 to authorize military intervention. On August 20, 1968, 200,000 Soviet troops were sent into Czechoslovakia to occupy the territory and suppress the Prague Spring. Immediately after the invasion, all reforms were repealed. In doing so, the government reasserted Soviet control and silenced dissent. In both the cases of the Hundred Flowers and the Prague Spring, there was a crackdown on freedom of speech when it began to threaten the political standing of the incumbent government. Crackdowns resulted in the restoration of the government’s political power. However, Gorbachev was hesitant to crack down because of his ideological commitment to glasnost—he believed that a crackdown went against its founding tenets of promoting freedom and open discourse. This is how glasnost became the fuel that ignited the thirst for freedom and autonomy in the Baltic States. 

Because of Gorbachev’s lack of an early crackdown on glasnost, critiques against the Soviet Union began to proliferate. Journalists began to openly challenge the precepts of Marxism; freedom of the press exponentially surged. Vitali Korotich, a leading editor of the Soviet newspaper Ogonyok, perfectly encapsulated the revolution from glasnost, writing that “We are learning to say out loud words we were afraid to voice for decades. In the past it was difficult for Ogonyok to decide to publish just a one-sentence reference to the need for public control over the Soviet military and the KGB. Now we publish everything that we can vouch for, which is how it should be.” By the end of 1989, there were over 300 democratic publications in the Soviet Union. Glasnost allowed previously suppressed political forces to gain public attention, leading to increased independent associational activity. Journalists put dissident and opposition voices into the public spotlight which resonated with a public that was hungry for truth. This newfound openness eroded decades of Soviet secrecy and iron-fisted governance. Korotich concludes, “The machine that used to subjugate by crushing rather than persuading is worn out. [...] This fear is fading, and the nation is slowly coming back to life”.

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Cover Image From: https://www.cvce.eu/en/obj/glasnost_board_game_1989-en-ad10c421-97f3-4365-a815-39555a24720a.html

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