ABSTRACT
With the departure of the ‘old guard’ in the Soviet leadership – Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and Chernenko – the USSR began to develop a new approach to propaganda and information policy, and to use the western media more effectively for the propagation of Soviet viewpoints. These changes had significant effects on images of the Soviet Union in the west. This chapter examines those changes, and how they have affected coverage of the Soviet Union on British television. Soviet journalist Vladimir Posner explains: ‘“Glasnost” is translated into English as “openness”, but that’s not quite correct. Glasnost is the ideological powerhouse of the drive for reform. Without glasnost there is no possibility of democracy, of political creativity among the masses, or of their participation in management. Soviet defensiveness and secrecy around the events at Chernobyl, though contradicting the ‘openness’ of Gorbachov’s new information policy, was not qualitatively different to that of other nuclear states in similar circumstances.
