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Essay on Glasnost
Whole periods of Soviet history were changed by glasnost. Stalin, Brezhnev and Cherenko previously great leaders were unmasked as the brutal oppressive murders they really were. Only Lenin remained sacrosanct. Most telling of all, the school history exams for 1988 were cancelled. So many conventional wisdoms had been overturned in the previous months that the existing Soviet history books became useless. This change was not totally accepted by radicals or hardliners (Stephen, 1990).The radicals wished to go further, faster and were exemplified in such illegal publications as Glasnost.
Hardliners tried to retain their grip on people's minds by frequent attacks on the radicals in the conservative press. Prada the flagship Communist Party newspaper thundered that extremists and nationalists were hiding their true face behind a mask of commitment to perestroika. While glasnost did allow discussion to take place it is clear from exert that controls were placed on the discussion. The arrest and harassment of the more radical papers staff and the removal of material from libraries still ensured the attacks found the right targets (Stephen, 1990). The early years of glasnost and thus the early years of freedom of speech in the USSR are described and analyzed in exert.Many observers were initially skeptical about this policy. Conservative leaders in the Communist Party opposed glasnost and tried to undermine it.
However, particularly after the 27th Party Congress in February 1986, public officials and citizens began to take Gorbachev’s call for more open, critical discussion seriously. Intellectuals in particular made use of the new freedom glasnost offered to criticize the government and to engage in activities that were previously prohibited (Brian, 1991).While in the West the notion of "glasnost" is associated with freedom of speech, the main goal of this policy was to make the country's management transparent and open to debate, to change the former situation.......
