Gorbachev Introduces Glasnost
In the years after he became General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party in March 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev began promoting glasnost, a policy of openness that loosened state control over information and public debate. Intended to revitalize the Soviet system, it instead exposed its failures on a vast scale and helped set in motion the chain of events that ended with the dissolution of the USSR in 1991. The date of 1985 marks the start of this shift, though glasnost as a formal, widely used policy took shape over the following two or three years.
The background was a country in long-term stagnation. Under Leonid Brezhnev, economic growth had slowed, technology lagged behind the West, and the leadership had aged. The war in Afghanistan, begun in 1979, was costly and unpopular. Gorbachev, relatively young at 54, believed the system needed reform, and he paired glasnost with perestroika, or restructuring, of the economy. Glasnost was meant to mobilize public criticism against corrupt officials and inefficient bureaucracies that were resisting change.
Early steps were cautious, but the 1986 Chernobyl disaster became a turning point. The initial official silence drew criticism at home and abroad, and Gorbachev later said the accident pushed him toward greater candor. Censorship eased, and newspapers and magazines began publishing on Stalin-era repression, economic shortcomings, and social problems once treated as taboo. Banned books were published, films were released from the shelves, and many political prisoners, including the physicist Andrei Sakharov, were freed from exile or detention. Elections in 1989 offered voters real choices for the first time in decades.
The consequences went beyond what Gorbachev planned. Open criticism eroded the Communist Party's authority and the legitimacy of the Soviet story itself. Nationalist movements in the Baltic republics, the Caucasus, Ukraine, and elsewhere used the new freedom to press for autonomy and then independence. In 1989, communist governments across Eastern Europe fell, and Moscow chose not to intervene. Meanwhile, economic reforms failed to deliver improvements, and shortages deepened discontent.
A failed hardline coup in August 1991 fatally weakened both Gorbachev and the central government. By December, the Soviet Union was formally dissolved and Gorbachev resigned. Historians still debate how much of the collapse was due to glasnost itself and how much to deeper economic and structural problems that no reform could easily have solved. Gorbachev is remembered very differently in different places: widely admired in the West for ending the Cold War peacefully, and often criticized in Russia for the upheavals that followed.