Rather than a gift from above, it came to mean in practice a right asserted from below, analogous to freedom of speech and publication. Glasnost was what the British political scientist, Archie Brown, called “a facilitating concept” that enabled writers and journalists to push beyond limits that even Gorbachev and his most liberal-minded deputies, Aleksandr Yakovlev and Eduard Shevardnadze, anticipated or approved. Economically, it referred to the legalization of cooperatives and other semi-private business ventures, the demonopolization and liberalization of price controls, and the election of enterprise managers by the labor collective. Uskorenie, with its unfortunate connotations of working faster, fell by the wayside, but perestroika and glasnost gained in importance and substance after 1986.īy 1987, Gorbachev was acknowledging that perestroika was a word with many meanings, but “the one which expresses its essence most accurately … is revolution,” since the “qualitatively new” and radical changes which the Soviet Union required constituted a “revolutionary task.” Substantively, it was to mean in the political sphere the introduction of genuinely contested elections for new political institutions (e.g., the Congress of People’s Deputies), enhancement of the governing role of the soviets, and other measures to promote democratization of the Communist Party and the entire political system.
But it was in a speech of December 1984, four months before his elevation to the general secretaryship, where Gorbachev first identified them - and a third term, “uskorenie” (acceleration) - as key themes. Both terms can be found in Gorbachev’s speeches and writings as early as the mid-1970s. The word glasnost actually appeared in Article 9 of the 1977 Soviet Constitution although without any practical application.
Stalin occasionally had used them as had his successors.
“Perestroika” (restructuring) and “glasnost” (openness) were Mikhail Gorbachev’s watchwords for the renovation of the Soviet body politic and society that he pursued as general secretary of the Communist Party from 1985 until 1991.
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