America Gets a Taste of Glasnost

Soviet Russia opened up in 1988, but its freedom proved fleeting. We should guard ours vigilantly.

- By Vladimir Kontorovich And Eugene Kontorovich

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.