Glasnost and its Side-Effects

Abstract

When the concept of perestroika was first announced at the April 1985 Plenary Meeting of the Central Committee of the CPSU, it appeared as one more attempt to reform the Soviet economy. Although the reforms subsequently approved by the Seventeenth Party Congress were of much wider scope than anything previously attempted, it was the addition of glasnost that indicated a fundamental change in Soviet thinking and policies. If perestroika was understood as the reconstruction or, to be more precise, the restructuring or reforming of the Soviet economic system, the meaning of glasnost had not been so clearly defined and its implications for the very existence of the Soviet Union were not at first apparent to any Western observer, and possibly not even to the Soviet leadership.