Glasnost & Perestroika

Glasnost (pronounced glaz-nost, glahz‐nost or glahs-nuhst (Russian))

Openness in the context of politics.

1985 (English adoption): A modern English borrowing from the Russian гла́сность (glásnost) literally meaning “publicity” or “fact of being public” but usually translated as “openness” or something in the vein of what is now referred to as “transparency”.  Although entering English use in 1985, the word had been in the Russian language for centuries and appears in the earliest Russian dictionaries.  Among the West's Kremlinologists, the word had been familiar since the Glasnost Rally, staged by the embryonic Soviet civil rights movement in December 1965 and appeared in 1972 in reference to a 1969 letter by dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.  The word is ultimately from the Old Church Slavonic glasu (voice) from the primitive Indo-European galso-, from the root gal- (to call, shout).  It was first used in a socio-political sense by Lenin and popularized in English after Mikhail Gorbachev used it several times in his speech in March 1985, accepting the post of General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (USSR).  Glasnost is a noun, the adjectival forms are glasnostian & glasnostic.

Perestroika (pronounced per-uh-stroi-kuh or pyi-ryi-stroi-kuh (Russian))

Structural economic reform.

1985 (English adoption): A modern English borrowing from the Russian Перестройка (perestróĭka) literally meaning “rebuilding”, “reconstruction” or “reorganization” and gaining currency as an expression of an intent by government to initiate structural economic reform.  Perestroika is a noun, the other noun (and adjectival) form being perestrokian.  It also begat Salinastroika (a blend of Salinas- +‎ -(peres)troika, which referred to the programme of liberalization (which didn’t end well) under Carlos Salinas de Gortari, President of Mexico (1988-1994).  Perestroika is an ancient Russian word but was rare and in only technical use until the 1980s.  It was constructed from pere- (re-) from Old Russian pere- (around, again) from the Proto-Slavic per- from the primitive Indo-European root per- (forward) (hence "through, around, against”) + stroika (building, construction) from the Old Russian stroji (order) from the primitive Indo-European stroi-, from the root stere- (to spread).  Entering general use in English in 1985, in the USSR, use in the now familiar context actually pre-dated the Gorbachev era, being discussed during the twenty-sixth Party Congress in 1981.

Decline and fall, 1953-1991

After comrade Stalin's (1878-1953; Soviet leader 1924-1953) death in 1953, the USSR entered a period of economic stagnation relative to the West, a situation not wholly understood at the time, disguised as it was by secrecy, Sputnik and the (often over-estimated) strength of the Soviet nuclear arsenal.  After the decade-long, idiosyncratic rule of Comrade Khrushchev (1894–1971; Soviet leader 1953-1964) gave way to twenty years of increasingly geriatric government, in 1985, the relatively youthful comrade Gorbachev (Mikhail Gorbachev (1931–2022; Soviet leader 1985-1991) assumed the leadership.  He announced to the party and the world that the USSR’s society and economy were in dire need of reform, the words he chose to describe the necessary processes were respectively glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring).

Glasnost under the gaze of comrade Lenin (Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924; Russian revolutionary & theorist, founder of the Bolsheviks and head of government in Russia or the Soviet Union 1917-1924).  One of the fruits of reform was that in 1988, the USSR staged its first ever government-approved beauty contest, the Miss Moscow title won by sixteen year-old Maria Kalinina (b 1971) who was later crowned Miss USSR.

Glasnost & perestroika captured imaginations in the West and comrade Gorbachev became something of a political rock star but while the reforms had profound geopolitical consequences, they weren’t what had been intended, the forces unleashed destabilizing the USSR and its satellite states.  In 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall triggered a chain-reaction of political upheaval which saw the overthrow of the Moscow-aligned régimes of the Warsaw Pact and in 1991 the USSR was itself dissolved, ending both the cold war and an empire which had endured almost four decades after comrade Stalin’s death.  Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013; UK prime-minister 1979-1990) famously observed of comrade Gorbachev that he was a man she “…could do business with” but that wasn’t a novel view of the Kremlin from Downing Street.  Clement Attlee (1883–1967; UK prime-minister 1945-1951) in 1961 spoke of comrade Stalin in terms which while not exactly warm, did reveal a certain respect: “He was clearly a pretty ruthless tyrant, but a man you could do business with because he said yes and no and didn’t have to refer back.  He was obviously the man who could make decisions.”  Winston Churchill (1875-1965; UK prime-minister 1940-1945 & 1951-1955) also appreciated the sense of certainty associated with discussions with comrade Stalin; he was a man “…could do business with”.  Churchill acknowledged it could be torturously difficult to secure agreement with the Georgian but once reached, he kept his word.  Possibly what Churchill had in mind was the notorious “piece of paper” on which the two had divided the post-war Balkans into Soviet and British “spheres of influence”, a practical approach which appealed to comrade Stalin much more than the utopianism of the idealists the US State Department sent to Moscow.  Honor the informal agreement comrade Stalin did, thinking it a very good deal to sacrifice any say in Greece so he could grab the rest.

After glasnost, in the age of Mr Putin: Lindsay Lohan in Moscow, June 2015.

The era of glasnost & perestroika was followed by the frequently chaotic years of the 1990s during which the old Soviet empire fragmented into its historic component states and Russian society and its economy what transformed into what is usually understood as "capitalism with Russian characteristics" with much of what that implies.  However, the 1990s were genuinely a period of glasnost (openness) and in those years Western historians were granted their first access to the Soviet archives and some long held suppositions were confirmed while others were overturned and many books were updated, the revised editions including for the first time original source documents from Moscow.  It was a brief opening of the vault which didn't long stay ajar and what Russia has become under (former) comrade Vladimir Putin (b 1952; president or prime minister of Russia since 1999) represents his view that what Gorbachev did was a mistake and handled differently, the USSR might well have endured to this day.  Mr Putin was under no illusions about the failure of the Soviet economic model and he would have preferred the reforms of the 1980s to have moved towards the Chinese model of state capitalism (the so-called "socialism which Chinese characteristics") under the supervision of the Communist Party.  Still, very much in the tradition of Lord Palmerston (1784-1865; variously UK prime-minister or foreign secretary on several occasions 1830-1865) who noted his country had neither eternal allies or perpetual enemies and that only “interests are eternal and perpetual”, years before Russia’s seizure of the Crimean peninsula (2014) or the “special military operation” (ie the “full-scale” invasion of Ukraine in 2022), commenting on a recently published study of the Yalta Conference (February 1945), Zbigniew “Zbig” Brzeziński (1928–2017; US National Security Advisor 1977-1981) observed “…simply replace Stalin with someone whose name rhymes with his, and Poland with Ukraine.”  Something of a realist in economic matters, Mr Putin would not have been opposed to perestroika (though he'd probably have done things a bit differently) but truly glasnost appalled him.