Countless words will be dedicated in the following days to Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet leader who died Aug. 30 at the age of 91. But throughout his obituaries, two specific words will likely be repeated: glasnost and perestroika. Those two transliterations of Russian words were synonymous with his campaign for reforming Soviet society through policies, and the latter was the title of his 1982 book Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World. But what do they actually mean? Shortly after Gorbachev became the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1985, he ramped up talk about glasnost—meaning “openness,” particularly openness of information—and perestroika, meaning a “restructuring,” specifically of the Communist economy and political system. The terms went hand-in-hand because, together, the reforms they described would make the Soviet Union more democratic and incorporate some features of capitalism to revitalize the economy. In more concrete terms, glasnost was supposed to translate into a loosening of state censorship of the media — “‘Those who attempt to suppress the fresh voice, the just voice, according to old standards and attitudes, need to get out of the way,'” as TIME reported Gorbachev saying in a July 1986 speech. Perestroika was supposed to translate into the incorporation of some features of a market economy into the Soviet economy, by loosening price controls, encouraging more entrepreneurism and limited private businesses, and by making imported consumer goods easier to purchase, as TIME explained to readers in 1989. “It is particularly important that the actual pay of every worker be closely linked to his personal contribution to the end result, and that no limit be set,'” he said in a 1987 speech. In a July 27, 1987 cover story, TIME dubbed the policies “Gorbachev’s Revolution” and described the “chilly dawn of reform” spreading in Soviet society: “Mikhail Gorbachev’s calls for glasnost (openness), demokratizatsiya (democratization) and perestroika (restructuring) have become the watchwords of a bold attempt to modernize his country’s creaky economic machinery and revitalize a society stultified by 70 years of totalitarian rule.” As a footnote clarified, “In current Soviet parlance, [glasnost]’s meaning is not so much openness as public airing or public disclosure.”
 The factors that went into the development of those policies were many. For example, in the wake of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, Soviet news outlets produced what TIME called “unprecedented candor” about the mismanagement of the nuclear power plant. Even the newspaper Pravda, the “official voice of the Communist party,” as TIME put it “dropped the rosy prose” and photos of happy workers “in favor of a strong slap at Soviet incompetence, confusion and cowardice” as it reported on officials who left their posts after the accident and the firing of the plant’s director and chief engineer. That openness about what had gone wrong—turning to the truth rather than to propaganda—was just one hint at the coming of glasnost. Get your history fix in one place: sign up for the weekly TIME History newsletter As for perestroika, that involved, as the magazine put it, “making the Soviet Union an economic superpower as well as a military one.” It meant modernizing Soviet factories and forging business partnerships with the West. (For example, Bloomingdale’s department store in New York City started selling Soviet rye bread in 1989.) TIME also reported that Gorbachev’s effort to get a handle on the high levels of alcoholism in the Soviet Union—by raising the drinking age from 18 to 21, shortening liquor store hours and raising the prices of vodka—were a “perestroika of the personality,” an attempt to restructure individuals.
Gorbachev himself provided one view of the effectiveness of the policies in an interview with TIME around the 20th anniversary of those words becoming part of the international lexicon. “Seventy-seven percent of Russians say they want to live in a free and democratic country,” he said. “That is the legacy of perestroika.” The idea of glasnost also empowered the Russian LGBTQ community—which has been threatened by recent anti-gay government policies—to speak more openly about sexuality. But the change was not immediate, or total. Some U.S. businesses initially weren’t eager to work with Soviet companies, feeling that their values still weren’t aligned and that there wasn’t enough profit in it anyway, given currency conversion issues with rubles. “Many Americans believe that helping strengthen the Soviet Union could damage U.S. interests,” TIME reported in 1988. “And because of Western security concerns, many U.S. commercial technologies will remain off limits to ventures with the Soviets… Imports of Soviet goods to the U.S. are inhibited by an American law that withholds favorable trading status from certain countries practicing repressive emigration policies. Result: the Soviets have turned to West Germany, Japan and other industrial partners for investment capital and production expertise… Meanwhile, their Western partners, who are mainly eager to sell products and services in the Soviet Union, must cope with the nonconvertibility of Soviet currency. No matter how profitable a Soviet joint venture may be, U.S. companies have little use for rubles.” As a result, there were shortages ranging from fresh fruit to clothing, but the policies were part of a movement that would change the Soviet Union—and 20th century history—irrevocably. The Soviet Union’s legendary poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko described how perestroika and glasnost went hand in hand to TIME in 1987, and his take arguably still rings profound, more than three decades later: “One could describe glasnost metaphorically as the air above and the national economy as the earth below. It is easier and faster to refresh the air than it is to turn and fertilize the earth, yet purified air is necessary before healthy changes can be made in the earth. So it is too early for us to speak of economic triumphs, and unlike the old days, nobody is making any messianic promises. We must wait for the earth to absorb the air, and be enriched.”
The word Perestroika is used to describe the time of deep modernization in the USSR from 1986-1991 initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev , the last Soviet leader. It followed the years of stagnation in the world’s biggest country, and actually was a result of a crisis that permeated the entire Soviet society. The one-party, one-candidate political system upset citizens who saw the democratic process in action throughout Europe and the United States. Administrative management was dictated by decades-old regulations and outdated methods. Soviet military forces were scattered throughout the world in attempts to maintain communism. Mikhail Gorbachev surprised the entire world with his announcement of Perestroika, entirely changing the political landscape of the Soviet Union. Perestoika (literally meaning “rebuilding” or “restructuring”) was thought to bring crucial changes to the life of all Soviet people, to “restructure” the Soviet political and economic system. It opened the Soviet Union to the World and the World - to the Soviet people, but also led to economic fiasco and a fatal division within the Soviets themselves; the political and national interests of its parts collided and eventually Perestroika ended with the collapse of the USSR in the 1991. Learning Russian Perestroika was and remains nowadays one of the few Russian words that foreigners from around the globe know quite well - in the late 1980s, the eyes of the whole world were on the Soviet Union. No one could say at that tough time what the new power would look like, but everybody knew that it was the end of an old regime; such was Perestroika. Some sources list March 1985 when Mikhail Gorbachev came to power as the beginning of Perstroika. He indeed was the man who launched it; he has become known world-wide known as the “father of Perestroika”. Gorbachev first used the term in his report on economic reform delivered just days after taking the county’s top post. But during the initial period, Gorbachev’s reforms were similar to those of previous regimes, repeating their fatal mistakes: transforming the already existing Stalinist system, the so-called policy of uskorenie (or “acceleration”) didn’t bring any considerable, fundamental change. It was only in early 1987 that the motto became a full-scale campaign and start yielding practical results. At the Plenum of the CPSU Central Committee in January, Perestroika was actually proclaimed an official state ideology. Initially meant to affect the economy only, step by step Perestroika started to penetrate all spheres of people’s lives and changed them dramatically. War on Bureaucracy The Soviet Union’s planned economy became the key target for Perestroika’s machine. Seeking to bring the Soviet Union up to economic level of the developed capitalist countries, Gorbachev decentralized economic controls and encouraged enterprises to become self-financing. The 1987 Law on State Enterprises allowed them to set their own prices and wages. The Law on Cooperatives, enacted in May 1988, was perhaps the most radical of the economic reforms during the early part of the Gorbachev era. For the first time since Vladimir Lenin's New Economic Policy, the law permitted private ownership of businesses in the services, manufacturing, and foreign-trade sectors. Soviet people witnessed the first cooperative restaurants, shops, and manufacturers. These and other reforms were driving the country to a free market economy, gradually eliminating the total control of the communist party. But Gorbachev went further: he turned to Western capitalist countries for financial assistance, and foreigners started to invest in the Soviet economy. Closer to People “Glasnost” meaning “transparency”, “openness”, and “demokratizazija” or democratization were Perestoika’s driving forces. Gorbachev refused a one-sided election system and decided to involve the people in the political process. This resulted in a general election in 1989 to decide the Congress of People’s Deputies - for the first time ever the citizens of the Soviet Union got to elect their country’s administrative officials making their choice of candidates, including non-communists! Gorbachev began withdrawing forces from Afghanistan, and allowed the freedom of religion and freedom of speech that so many other countries already enjoyed. The Soviet people became freer to act as individuals, something they were deprived of for many decades. In a country where the affairs of state had been conducted behind closed doors for years, politics became more open and the politicians themselves younger and closer to ordinary people. Mikhail Gorbachev was the first Soviet leader to meet with the public, face to face, in a spontaneous manner. This was a sensation. Soviet television gave wide coverage of Gorbachev’s endless trips. People loved their leader, who quickly turned to a kind of TV star, and welcomed his reform intentions. But there was a catastrophic shortfall in funding for fully fledged modernization - the arms race and cold war expenses accounted for a quarter of the Soviet budget. Reducing tension with the West and with the USA in order to reduce the threats of the Cold War became yet another priority of Gorbachev’s Perestroika. From Strong Enemies to Good Friends Gorbachev would expound upon his major ideas of new foreign policy in his book entitled “Perestroika and new thinking for our country and the whole world” (Перестройка и новое мышление для нашей страны и для всего мира) which appeared in 1987. Its main message was addressed to the world’s superpowers which, the author claimed, have to unite in the nuclear age in order to protect international peace and stability. In the book, Gorbachev continued saying that all ideological and economic disagreements between the world’s socialist and capitalist systems have to be left behind and forgotten before the common goal - the protection of universal human values. First of all it applied to the Soviet-American relations. In 1985 Gorbachev met with the American president Ronald Reagan in Geneva. The 40-minute meeting didn’t bring any appreciable result, but it definitely marked the beginning of a new era in relations between the two nations. On January 1st, 1986, the people of the two countries for the first time in history received New Year TV greetings from both an American president and a Soviet leader. In October
1986, Gorbachev and Reagan met again, in Iceland. The meeting would go down
in history as the Reykjavik summit. This was where the new Soviet foreign
policy was first officially declared. In the
aftermath of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in April 1986, the Soviets
proposed eliminating INF weapons from Europe (INF’s are "Intermediate-Range
Nuclear Forces", which are distinct from ICBMs, or intercontinental
ballistic missiles). The Russians also proposed the elimination of 50% of
all strategic arms, including ICBMs, and agreed not to include British or
French weapons in the count. The American side was instead asked to pledge not
to implement strategic defenses for the next ten years, in accordance
with the SALT I agreement. The talks collapsed at the last minute as, according to analysts, the agreement would have required "an exceptional level of trust" that neither side had yet developed. But what may look like a failure has been considered by many participants, observers, historians and politicians as a considerable breakthrough which eventually made possible the signing of the INF Treaty (Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty) in Washington on December 8, 1987. It also had a dramatic impact on the entire world order. In 1987, the Warsaw Treaty Member States adopted a new, purely defensive military doctrine stipulating considerable arms reduction. From Cold War to Warm Peace One of Perestroika’s major goals was achieved: the climate in the Soviet-US relations was getting warmer and within 3 years confrontation was all over. At the two-day Malta summit, on December 3, 1989 the leaders of the two superpowers, Gorbachev and Bush, declared an end to the Cold War. ”We are at the beginning of a long road to a lasting, peaceful era.” Mikhail Gorbachev said. A year later, in November 1990, in Paris a so-called “Charter for a New Europe”, also known as Paris Charter was adopted by most European governments, Canada, the USA and the USSR actually proclaiming an end to an almost half a century long resistance and a beginning of a new era - of democracy, peace and unity. Epic Failure Meanwhile, Gorbachev was often criticized for paying too high a price: the USSR agreed on too many concessions in arms reduction and refused its influence in socialist Europe. Renouncing the Brezhnev Doctrine that gave the Soviet Union the right to intervene militarily in Warsaw Pact countries, communist governments in Eastern Europe were overthrown; the Berlin wall fell, the Soviet troops withdrew. Results of the economic reforms were disappointing, too. Workers demanded steep wage increases. As the government printed more money, prices were going up. Thus, goods usually distributed through official state stores at fixed prices quickly disappeared as speculators snatched them up to make more profit. By 1988-89, many staples could not be found even in Moscow. For the first time since the end of the Second World War, a food ration ticket system returned. Instead of streamlining the system, Gorbachev's decentralization caused a new production crisis. The USSR’s external debt more than tripled. The ruble, the Soviet national currency, devalued dramatically. The country’s gold reserves reduced by 10 times while the +2.3% economic growth in 1985 was replaced by a -11% recession in 1991. Economic decline was worsened by political tensions between forces supporting socialism and parties and movements insisting on capitalist principals. The future of the Soviet Union, of all the republics forming it, their relations and coordination between Russian supporters of a republic and the Soviet Union’s state run public authorities were all still more points of contention. Perestroika sparked numerous national conflicts. Aimed at bringing the country out of the crisis, Perestroika eventually destroyed the Soviet Union. Written Maria Finoshina, RT correspondent |
What is the Russian word that was used to describe the increased openness in Soviet society in the 1980s?
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