America Gets a Taste of Glasnost

To read the American press in recent months is to encounter a feeling reminiscent of the Soviet Union in 1988. At that time, the Communist Party was in the middle of Mikhail Gorbachev's campaign of glasnost, or "openness." As the authorities relaxed controls on information, previously unmentionable stories of the regime's crimes and deceits poured off the printing presses. So it seems now in the U.S., as journalists publish what many have known but feared to say for years.

Revelations of the scale and details of Stalin-era repressions were perhaps the most sensational. But other aspects of the country’s history and official dogma, only recently unchallengeable, were also trashed. On one day a journal might publish an article arguing that the rates of economic growth, an important point of pride for the regime, had been exaggerated. Another might argue for the superiority of the market over central planning, the mainstay of the Soviet system. Media coverage of official corruption and social problems, such as drug abuse, was given the green light. So too was the publication of literature banned during the previous 70 years.

One might expect the stories reported during glasnost, ranging as they did from tragic to regrettable, to depress the popular mood. Instead, the reading public hungered for new revelations. Print runs of obscure periodicals ballooned into millions, and modest academics became celebrities for dismantling old dogmas.

The exhilaration of seeing the forbidden truth about rulers’ abuses publicly revealed makes the present moment in the U.S. feel like 1988. Americans are reading that their president has been mentally impaired throughout his term. Only months ago his aides, as well as many in the media, proclaimed he was sharp as a tack. It turns out that Hunter Biden’s laptop was his, despite the claims by dozens of former intelligence functionaries. We can now openly discuss the campaign by the secret police to frame Donald Trump as a Russian agent.

The list continues. It turns out that the virus that killed millions of people around the world most likely was engineered within a Chinese government lab and funded partially at U.S. taxpayer expense. For years the public-health establishment labeled this a right-wing conspiracy. We can now also discuss the harm inflicted on children by school closings—conversations that at one point were forbidden as dangerous “misinformation.” Some participants in these abuses, such as Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, are confessing how they reluctantly contributed. This week he announced that his company is ending its “fact checking” program and reducing its censorship of political content, explaining that America has reached a “cultural tipping point.”

Children were violated under the old order. There is now a sudden frankness about the damage caused by the sterilization and mutilation of children in the name of a government-endorsed transgender ideology. Last week many Americans discovered the story of the Pakistani child-rape gangs in the U.K., which was first reported years ago. Why now? It can be explained only through glasnost—when one can speak freely, everything that wasn’t said tumbles out.

In both the Soviet and American cases, the misdeeds revealed were too big to be previously unknown. Almost every family in the Soviet Union had been affected by repressions. Children learned such stories from their parents and grandparents but couldn’t publicly acknowledge them. Those following President Biden’s appearances saw that something was amiss, but it wasn’t fit for a polite discussion. The thrill of the revelations of 1988 and of today isn’t so much from learning hidden facts as it is from having one’s private knowledge validated. The spirit of glasnost in America is that of being able to speak about the things you had known but not been permitted to mention.

There are, of course, differences between these episodes. The Soviet revelations concerned murder. Those who died from Covid were what you might call victims of negligent homicide by the Chinese Communist Party. The coverups of Soviet abuses were produced by the centralized apparatus of state coercion in a closed society. The coverups being exposed today were created by diffuse networks of likeminded people without formal coercive power, within a nominally open, pluralistic society-albeit at times in cooperation with government actors.

That such stories were suppressed for so long without the heavy-handed Soviet tools suggests we might overestimate the liberalism of our society--or underestimate the sufficiency of mild sanctions like social stigma and troubles at work to achieve illiberal ends.

Glasnost contributed to the demise of the Soviet system and laid the foundation for Russia's free media environment. Yet over time Vladimir Putin rebuilt constraints, allowing him to jail journalists and kill political opponents. Let us remain vigilant as we enjoy our own period of openness and not think ourselves incapable of falling back into a period of censorship and silence.

Vladimir Kontorovich is a retired professor of economics at Haverford College and author of "Reluctant Cold Warriors: Economists and National Security." Eugene Kontorovich is a professor at George Mason University Scalia Law School.