Glasnost

Glasnost was Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of openness, but in the book it becomes more than a controlled reform: by allowing suppressed history to be spoken and read, it loosened the authority of the Soviet account of the past and helped unsettle the political order built upon it. Its decisive consequence was not simply that previously forbidden facts entered public circulation. Once people could name the victims and recognize the scale of the crimes, the state’s claims to historical legitimacy began to collapse with them.

From controlled openness to an opening of history

The policy emerged against a long silence. The account describes collectivization, the deaths and deportations of millions of kulaks, the famine organized by Joseph Stalin in Ukraine, and the arbitrary arrests and killings of the purges as events officially treated as though they had never happened. Families nevertheless remembered the knock that took a father away. Children learned that speaking about a parent branded an enemy of the people could be dangerous, and that survival required acting as if the loss had not occurred. Public history, meanwhile, followed Stalin’s own Short Course. Glasnost therefore confronted not just censored information but a learned social habit of silence.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had predicted that the system would be endangered as soon as people began telling the truth. When Gorbachev used the word glasnost, meaning transparency, in an address marking the seventieth anniversary of the October Revolution, he did not intend the consequences the narrative assigns to it. He imagined concessions that could be limited and controlled. Before assembled dignitaries of world communism, he spoke of filling in the blank pages of history and acknowledged “hundreds of thousands” of victims of Stalinism. The actual toll, the narrator stresses, ran into the tens of millions. Even the understated official acknowledgment, however, functioned as permission: the opening had begun, and its contents could no longer be confined to the size Gorbachev had envisaged.

Books, names, and the public record

From 1988, works that had circulated only among intellectuals, in samizdat, or in foreign editions smuggled into the country became publicly available. The change was visible in ordinary routines: huge print runs sold out, people queued at kiosks from dawn, and readers consumed books on the subway, on buses, and while walking. The account conveys the speed and collective intensity of the change through successive reading enthusiasms. One week Moscow was absorbed in Doctor Zhivago; the next, readers turned to Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, George Orwell’s 1984, or Robert Conquest’s histories of collectivization and the purges. Conquest’s work had long been dismissed by fellow travelers in the West as the work of a CIA agent; now, books once inaccessible or stigmatized could enter everyday conversation.

Under Andrei Sakharov’s patronage, dissidents founded the Memorial Society to identify people who had been killed and then erased from public memory. Its purpose echoed Anna Akhmatova’s wish in Requiem: “I should like to call you all by name.” At first, the group hesitated to use the word millions. Once it did, the figure seemed less like a new claim than a truth for which the public had been waiting for permission to speak aloud. Glasnost thus changed both the contents of historical discussion and its terms: the dead could be counted, named, and remembered as victims rather than omitted from the record.

The official language of the Party also shifted with striking speed. At a speech commemorating the bicentennial of the French Revolution, Alexander Yakovlev, Gorbachev’s principal adviser, said that Vladimir Lenin had been the first politician to use the term concentration camp. On television, Yakovlev explained that the decree rehabilitating everyone persecuted since 1917 was not an act of clemency. He said, “We are not pardoning them, we are asking their pardon. The goal of this decree is to rehabilitate us, who by remaining silent and looking away were accomplices to these crimes.” The reversal assigned responsibility not only to the perpetrators but also to a society and party that had remained silent. Within less than two years of Gorbachev’s address, the official framework had moved from limited acknowledgment toward repentance; the book describes a sudden consensus that the country had been ruled by criminals.

From historical disclosure to political rupture

The account connects this liberation of history to the collapse of Communist regimes in Eastern Europe. A crucial disclosure concerned the secret protocol to the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact: once its existence was recognized, the Baltic states could argue that their incorporation into the Soviet Union had begun with an illegal occupation in 1939 and remained illegal fifty years later. The argument’s force lay in the changed conditions of public speech. The Soviet Union had once answered such a challenge with tanks; by 1989, those days were over. The exposure of a concealed past had supplied political claims with evidence, while glasnost had helped make those claims speakable.

The book marks the pace of 1989 through an accelerating comparison: what Solidarność had taken ten years to achieve in Poland, the Hungarians achieved in ten months, the East Germans in ten weeks, and the Czechs in ten days. Apart from Romania, the transitions came without the violence the narrator associates with earlier Communist repression. Velvet revolutions brought intellectual figures such as Václav Havel to power amid public celebration; people kissed in the streets, and Western European commentary invoked the “end of history.” The contrast between the long duration of imposed silence and the rapid political changes makes glasnost appear less like a reform successfully contained than a release whose momentum surpassed its authors’ intentions.

The afterlife of openness

The consequences of disclosure were not presented as uncomplicated liberation. On a train passing through remote countryside, Eduard Limonov hears a fellow passenger describe a grotesque case of abuse in a village. Their conversation turns from this immediate misery to the claim that nothing in the country had ever worked. The traveler’s outlook differs from an older, more affirmative sense of Soviet life, in which people could complain while still taking pride in Gagarin, Sputnik, the army, the empire, or the belief that society was more equitable than the West. In the narrator’s reading, glasnost had brought two conclusions to ordinary people: that those who had ruled since 1917 were sadists and murderers, and that they had ruined the country. The passenger calls it “Upper Volta with nuclear missiles.”

That exchange gives the state of glasnost a second, more unsettled register. The newly available truth does not arrive as a stable or purely emancipatory national story; it can produce shame, anger, and a sense of collective failure alongside recognition of past crimes. The passenger’s verdict is not offered as the final historical judgment, but as evidence of how radically public perception had shifted. Glasnost opened the archive and altered what could be said about power. In doing so, it also weakened the reassuring national narratives through which many people had understood their sacrifices. Its political force lay in that double movement: remembering those whom the state had erased, and exposing the failures that the old official account had trained people not to see.