ABSTRACT
Literally, glasnost means making things public. It is an old Russian word from glas meaning ‘voice’ and came to be used for Gorbachev’s policy of loosening up the severe controls over the dissemination of information. Making things public has had different impacts in Russia’s history. For Herzen in the nineteenth century the freedom to publish his accusations against the abuses of absolutist power from his émigré refuge in London was vital to winning the cause of emancipating the serfs. The freedom to ‘make public’ went along with ‘being heard’. Herzen’s ringing denunciations from his newspaper Kolokol (‘The Bell’) caused widespread panic among officials at home and even the tsar learned of scandals from Herzen’s press. Today we can no longer expect that making a scandal public will provoke any reaction in Russia. But when Gorbachev came to power after three-quarters of a century of Soviet repression, even snippets of information were received voraciously. Glasnost had a spellbinding effect on the Soviet Union and the world. For
Gorbachev, it was the key to reforming the Soviet system and reviving an economy that he revealed was in a ‘pre-crisis situation’ after years of Soviet misrule. It was not intended to bestow greater freedom of speech as a concession to liberal democracy, but to breathe new life into the Soviet model of socialist development. By introducing what he called the ‘human factor’ he hoped to persuade ordinary people to participate in his reforms. He could not count on them if they were demoralised and discontented, nor could he expect improved labour productivity or discipline in the workplace. ‘Wideranging, up-to-date, frank information is a testimony of trust in people, respect for their reason, feelings and capacity to work things out for themselves. Glasnost in the work of party and state organs is an effective means of
struggling against bureaucratic distortions’, he said.1 Glasnost would help regain the party’s authority based not on force but on consent, although Gorbachev did not realise how low the party’s credibility was. In the first years of perestroika, glasnost was linked to the policy of ‘accel-
eration’ (uskoreniye), to make the economy more efficient. To do this required eliminating the malpractices that had thrived under the Brezhnev system, where it was said that to fulfil the Five Year Plan was less important than to create the appearance of having over-fulfilled it. It was necessary to expose the rot in the system and tackle bureaucratic misdeeds, which consisted of a long list of sins: paper-shuffling, narrow departmentalism, inflated reporting, false accounting, fraud, absenteeism, wastefulness, window-dressing, bribery, etc. Media outlets were the most effective way of communicating ideological messages and television would put Gorbachev in touch with over 90 per cent of the population. Through the media he could appeal directly to the public, bypassing the resistance to change from bureaucracies and ministries, whose numbers would be reduced by reform. Pravda’s leader of 27 March 1985 puts it clearly: ‘our press, television and radio are the instruments of glasnost and an important channel of information on the work of party, state and public organisations’. At first, however, journalists had to be spurred on to embrace glasnost and
overcome their well-founded in-built caution of a system that had punished initiative. In the first year, attempts at more openness had to be orchestrated by the party in leading articles in Pravda. But it was already clear that ostentatious photographs of the leader in the press and standard protocol appearances would not be taking place. Rumours made the rounds that Gorbachev had informed the editor of Pravda that he was no longer to be quoted simply to add weight to an important article; they could quote Lenin or Marx instead. The same story had been told of Andropov. It seemed to be the Kremlin’s first stab at light-hearted public relations. In fact, neither the Kremlin, nor the media were clear about how to manage the entry of glasnost. A fairly unusual two-day tour Gorbachev made of factories and shops in Moscow, where he first rubbed shoulders with workers and ordinary people was a missed photo opportunity. To emphasise a new stage of history, the nation had to see Gorbachev behave in a different light. This happened dramatically during Gorbachev’s visit to Leningrad in May,
two months after coming to power. It was here that his famous walkabout with the people took place, a thrilling experience for Soviet citizens who had become accustomed to inaccessible, geriatric leaders. It had been said that Gromyko, the 75-year-old master of Soviet diplomacy nicknamed ‘Mr Nyet’ (‘Mr No’) by the West, had not stepped out of his car to walk the streets of any city for 40 years. Here was Gorbachev, breaking away from his schedule, allowing himself to be surrounded by crowds, shaking hands with war veterans, smiling and exchanging comments. As an image-making exercise, the Leningrad tour had an enormous impact, but media chiefs were still hesitant: the walkabout received only a few minutes on television (but that
was enough to dazzle viewers), while Pravda carried a dry summary of the three-day event. The real sensation came three days later when permission finally came from the Kremlin to broadcast Gorbachev’s speech at the Smolny almost in full on television, so that viewers across the Soviet Union could see their new leader speaking with emotion, impromptu, and discussing problems with unusual frankness. This was to become Gorbachev’s style: dynamic, spontaneous, open. It was in stark contrast with what had come before. Although Khrushchev had shown great gusto and energy with crowds, he was in power in the early days of television when only one in four people had television sets, while the last decade had only seen old and ailing generalsecretaries unable to hold media attention. Gorbachev was aware of the power of television and the need for public relations, and his style promised to inject new life into news and current affairs. To boost his reforms, Gorbachev brought friends and supporters into the
top party hierarchy: Eduard Shevardnadze as Foreign Affairs minister; Aleksandr Yakovlev, known as the architect of glasnost and the person to whom editors could turn to most, heading the Central Committee Propaganda Department; and a few months later Boris Yeltsin, summoned from his post as First Party Secretary of the vast Sverdlovsk region in the Urals, to serve as Moscow city party boss. Reform was going slowly, mainly because appeals for greater freedom and initiative were bound up with demands for greater discipline and order. The unpopular anti-alcohol campaign was a case of the stick without the carrot. Based on an earlier Andropov disciplinarian programme which had the special support of Gorbachev’s conservative secondin-command, Yegor Ligachev, himself a teetotaller, the campaign was run without subtlety and had disastrous consequences in practice. It led not to a decrease in work absenteeism but to a flourishing illicit trade in home-brewed liquor (samogon), and the destruction of vineyards in Moldavia and Georgia, causing unemployment and loss of revenue. The campaign bore all the hallmarks of bureaucratic indifference and lack of prior public consultation. As for glasnost, when Pravda took the bold step of publishing an article on party privileges and special elite shops for the nomenklatura in its issue of 13 February 1986, the paper immediately got into trouble. Entitled Ochishcheniye (‘Cleansing’), using the device of readers’ letters to criticise party privileges, it provoked heated debate within the party, engaging two sparring partners – Yeltsin, who claimed privileges were the cause of the party’s decay, versus Ligachev, who publicly reprimanded the paper’s editor and forced a public retraction. Ligachev was in no doubt about what glasnost really meant: ‘All television and radio programmes must be subordinated to the single purpose of propaganda, explaining and putting party policy into practice. That is, they must be class oriented in essence’.2
