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.  Glasnost is a noun, the adjectival forms are glasnostian & glasnostic.

Among Kremlinologists in the West, 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).

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 (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 (1870–1924; head of government of 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.

After glasnost, during 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 under the supervision of the Communist Party.

Cordon

Cordon (pronounced kawr-dn)

(1)  A line of police, sentinels, military posts, warships, etc., enclosing or guarding an area.

(2) A cord or braid worn for ornament or as a fastening.

(3) A ribbon worn usually diagonally across the breast as a badge of a knightly or honorary order.

(4) A projecting course of stones at the base of a parapet.

(5) The coping of a scarp.

(6) In architecture, a stringcourse, especially one having little or no projection.

(7) A cut-stone riser on a stepped ramp or the like.  Also called a string course or belt course, an ornamental projecting band or continuous moulding along a wall.

(8) In horticulture, a fruit tree or shrub trained to grow along a support or a series of such supports.  Tree consists of a single stem bearing fruiting spurs, produced by cutting back all lateral branches

(9) To surround or blockade with or as with a cordon (usually followed by off).

(10) In cricket, the arc of fielders on the off side, behind the batsman; the slips and gully (but not the more distant third man).

1400–1450: Borrowed by Middle English from Middle French cordon (ribbon), diminutive of the Old French corde (string), derived from the Classical Latin chorda (gut) and Ancient Greek (Doric) χορδή or khordḗ (string of gut, cord, string of a lyre).

The meaning "cord or ribbon worn as an ornament” dates from the 1560s.  Sense of "a line of people or things guarding something" is from 1758.  The form cordon sanitaire (sanitary cordon), first noted in 1857, was a public health measure in the French Second Empire (Napoleon III), a guarded line between infected and uninfected districts during outbreaks of infectious disease.

The Cordon Sanitaire in Geopolitics

Originally a public health measure to contain the spread of infectious diseases, French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929; Prime Minister of France 1906-1909 & 1917-1920) conjured the phrase as a geopolitical metaphor in March 1919.  He urged the newly independent border-states, stretching from Finland to the Balkans (also called limitrophe states) that had seceded from the Russian Empire (and its successor the USSR) to form a defensive union and thus quarantine Western Europe from the spread of communism.

The concept evolved and was in its most politically and geographically defined form during the cold war when buffer states gave shape to the so-called iron curtain between east and west.  Winston Churchill (1875-1965; UK Prime Minister 1940-1945 & 1951-1955) didn’t invent the phrase but made it famous in his address at Fulton, Missouri in March 1946 when he noted that “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.”  This was the opposite of Clemenceau’s vision of protecting west from east; instead the buffer-states existed to protect the USSR from any prospect of another invasion from a resurgent Germany, a dominant theme in early post-war Soviet foreign policy.

Comrade Stalin's Cordon Sanitaire: the Cold-War Buffer States

The buffer states were a construct of Comrade Stalin (1878–1953; leader of the USSR, 1924-1953), his words backed first by four-hundred divisions and later the Soviet nuclear arsenal.  They lasted more than forty years, the system beginning to fracture only in the mid-1980s when USSR Communist Party General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev (b 1931; leader of the USSR, 1985-1991) retreated from adherence to the Brezhnev (Leonid Brezhnev; 1906–1982; leader of the USSR, 1964–1982) Doctrine which held that if socialism was threatened in any state, other socialist governments had an obligation to intervene to preserve it.  Gorbachev initiated the policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (economic restructuring), both of which exposed the contradictions inherent in the Soviet system.  By 1989, long an economic failure, the eastern bloc began politically to crumble and a wave of revolutions began.  In 1991, the USSR was dissolved.

Crowd control cordon creation: Metal outside & the velvet rope within, Mean Girls Premiere, Los Angeles, April 2004.

Temporary cordons are often not sufficiently robust physically to act as an effective barrier against a breach induced even by mild force and rely on their symbolic value in the same way the red, amber & green traffic signals controlling intersections usually achieve the desired effect even though pieces of illuminated colored plastic inherently can't stop a car.  Respect for them (coupled with a fear of the consequences if flouted) is what makes them effective.  The cordoning of crowds at events often works the same way.  While facilities such as stadiums or race tracks usually have permanent fences or other structures difficult to cross, ad-hoc events in spaces intended for other purposes use relatively flimsy temporary barriers which wouldn't withstand much pressure and rely on the cooperation (and again, fear of consequences) of those cordoned off.  Outside, cordons typically are created with movable metal or plastic modular fencing while inside, the favored form is the "velvet rope", strung between stanchions (although lengths of plastic chain are sometimes seen).  These have the advantage of being able to re-configure a cordon at short notice and when not in use, demand little space to store.         

Kyiv (formerly Kiev)

Kyiv (formerly Kiev) (pronounced kee-yiv (Ukrainian) or kee-yev (Russian))

(1) Capital of Ukraine, in the north-central region of the country on the Dnieper River.

(2) An oblast (a region or province in Slavic or Slavic-influenced countries (plural oblasts or oblasti)) of Ukraine, the medieval principality centered on Kiev (the Kievan state (Kievan Rus)).

(3) In culinary slang, a shortened for the dish Chicken Kiev (a breast of chicken stuffed with butter, garlic and parsley, rolled, breaded and fried). 

Pre 1000: From the Ukrainian Kýjiv or Kyyiv (Ки́їв), from the Russian Kíjev (Ки́ев), perhaps from the name Кий (Kij or Kyi), one of the city’s four legendary founders, from the Proto-Slavic kyjь (stick, club) although some historians regard this as a folk etymology and instead link it to an evolution of something from the local language.  The alternative forms are Kyïv, Kyjiv & Kyyiv, the earlier forms Kiou, Kiow, Kiovia, Kiowia, Kiew, Kief, Kieff & Kief all obsolete.  Historically, in Western use, an inhabitant of Kiev was a Kievan.

The Ukrainian government's official roman-alphabet name for the city is Kyiv, according to the national standard for romanization of Ukrainian Київ (Kyjiv), and has been adopted by geographic naming databases, international organizations, and by many other reference sources.  In the West, many style guides have been updated to reflect the government’s recommendation the preferred spelling should be Kyiv (although a few historians insist it should be Ki'iv), pronounced kee-yiv and a transliteration of the Ukrainian Київ.

The Russian form was a transliteration from the Russian Cyrillic Киев and, along with the associated pronunciation, was the internationally accepted name during the Soviet era, something that lasted well into the twenty-first century and many who couldn’t have found the place on a map would have been familiar with both because of the eponymous chicken dish introduced to popular Western cuisine in the 1960s.  The post-Soviet reaction to the Russification of Ukraine encouraged the Ukrainian authorities to adopt the local spelling, the cultural sensitivities heightened by Russia’s military incursions into Ukrainian territory since 2014.  The changing of locality names is nothing new in Europe, various parts of the continent having changed hands over thousands of years and names of localities have often been altered better to suit the needs of conquerors, sometimes as a form of triumphalism and sometimes just to ease the linguistic difficulties.  The area in which sits Kyiv has at times over the last millennium fallen under Mongol, Lithuanian, Polish, Russian, Soviet and now Ukrainian rule and while Russian and Ukrainian are both east Slavonic languages (as opposed to west Slavonic languages such as Polish, and south Slavonic ones like Bulgarian) and from the one original root they have, like just about all languages, diverged in forks which sometimes evolved and sometimes went extinct.

In the early modern period, Ukrainian absorbed some Polish influences and a number of vowels came to be pronounced differently from their Russian counterparts, the kind of regional difference quite familiar to those in England, Germany or the United States.  That would be variation enough to account for many differences but in its evolution, several letters of the alphabet became unique to Ukrainian (such as the ї in Київ) and the variations can make it difficult for native Russian speakers to understand some words or expressions when spoken by Ukrainians.  Still, there must be acknowledgement that name changes imposed from Moscow (whether Russian, Tsarist or Soviet) have so often reflected an astute understanding of propaganda and the implications of language.  When in the 1660s the Ukraine was taken from the Kingdom of Poland, the Russians promptly renamed the territory "Little Russia" although despite the assertions of some that here began the Kremlin's manufactured fiction that Russians & Ukranians are the one people with the one language, the root of that lie earlier.  The legend shared by three Slavic peoples is of three brothers, Czech, Lech & Rus who set off in three directions from the family and later settled in different places, the three fathering the Czechs, the Poles and the Rus (which begat both the Russians and Ukranians).     

Sometimes the changes effected by governments happen instantly upon occupation such as much as what was done in Nazi-occupied Europe but sometimes, the rectification or correction waits for centuries.  Although the Byzantine capital Constantinople fell to the Ottomans in 1453, it wasn’t until the Turkification movement, which began in the 1920s after the formation of the modern Turkish state, that the government began to encourage other countries to use Turkish names for Turkish cities, instead of the transliterations to Latin script which had been used during the Ottoman era.  In 1930, the Government gazetted the official change of name from Constantinople to Istanbul.  Ankara’s interest in linguistic hygiene was recently revived, the Turkish authorities issuing a communiqué advising the country’s name would change from the internationally recognized name from "Turkey" to “Türkiye”.  The concern is said to be the association of Turkey with other meanings in English (not the birds but rather “a person who does something thoughtless or annoying; an event or product which fails badly or is totally ineffectual”).  Around the word, those in chancelleries dutifully adjusted their directory entries while cynics wondered if the Turkish president might be looking for something to distract people from their problems.

The Chicken Kiev speech

What came to be known as the “Chicken Kiev speech” was delivered by President Bush (George HW Bush, George XLI; 1924–2018; US president 1989-1993) to a session of the Supreme Soviet of Ukraine in Kyiv on 1 August 1991.  The tone of his words came to be much criticized by the right of the Republican Party, still infused with the spirit of Ronal Reagan and heady from breathing in the dust which rose as the Berlin Wall fell.  Three weeks after the speech, the Ukrainian Declaration of Independence would be presented and a few months after that, over 90% of Ukrainians would vote to secede from the Soviet Union which would collapse before the year was out, an event at least hastened by Ukrainian independence.  Bush’s speech came directly after his meetings with Mikhail Gorbachev (b 1931; leader of the USSR 1985-1991), the last Soviet leader, who seems to have impressed the US president with both his sincerity and ability to pursue economic and political reform. 

Bush started well enough, telling his audience “…today you explore the frontiers and contours of liberty…”, adding “For years, people in this nation felt powerless, overshadowed by a vast government apparatus, cramped by forces that attempted to control every aspect of their lives.”  That encouraging anti-Moscow direction must have raised expectations but they were soon dashed, Bush continuing “President Gorbachev has achieved astonishing things, and his policies of glasnost, perestroika, and democratization point toward the goals of freedom, democracy, and economic liberty.”  Just to make sure there was no hint that Washington might be encouraging in Ukrainian minds any thoughts of independence, Bush provided clarification, telling his by now perhaps disappointed audience that “…freedom is not the same as independence.  Americans will not support those who seek independence in order to replace a far-off tyranny with a local despotism. They will not aid those who promote a suicidal nationalism based upon ethnic hatred."

The speech had been written by Condoleezza Rice (b 1954; US secretary of state 2005-2009), then on the eastern Europe desk at the National Security Council and a special assistant to the president for national security affairs although the "suicidal nationalism" flourish was inserted by Bush himself.  Commenting later, Dr Rice and Mr Bush would acknowledge the speech did not capture the moment, the winds of change which had been blowing since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, but both in their (sort of) apologias made the point that August of 1991 was a very different time and place from December and nobody had predicted the imminent demise of the Soviet Union.

Whatever the reaction of the Ukrainians, it was no more severe than that unleashed at home by the aggregations of anti-communists, American exceptionalists and right-wing fanatics, New York Times columnist William Safire (1929-2009) calling it the "Chicken Kiev speech" and a "colossal mis-judgment".  Later presidents, all of course who served in a post-Soviet environment, seemed to agree and changed direction, pushing for an aggressive expansion of NATO to embrace all the former Soviet bloc.  NATO would, at the now famous Bucharest summit in 2008, go further still, pledging that Ukraine and Georgia would one day be invited to join the alliance. Perhaps wishing to atone for the sins of the father, another President Bush (George W Bush, George XLIII; b 1946; US president 2001-2009) then wanted immediately to offer both nations membership roadmaps but even then, Berlin and Paris were cautious about antagonizing Russia and put both the former Soviet republics on the back-burner.  There they’ve stayed.

Chicken Kiev (côtelette de volaille in Russian & Ukrainian cuisine)

Chicken Kiev variations.

Ingredients

4 rashers of smoked streaky bacon
Olive oil
4 x 150 g skinless chicken breasts
3 tablespoons of plain flour
2 large free-range eggs
150 g fresh breadcrumbs
Sunflower oil
2 large handfuls of baby spinach or rocket
2 lemons
Butter
4 cloves of garlic
½ a bunch (15g) of fresh flat-leaf parsley
4 knobs of butter (at room temperature)
1 pinch of cayenne pepper
800 g Piper potatoes
1 head of broccoli
1 knob of unsalted butter

Instructions

Fry bacon in a pan at medium heat with no more than a drizzle of olive oil, until golden and crisp, then remove.

For the butter, peel garlic, then finely chop with the parsley leaves and mix into the softened butter with the cayenne.  Refrigerate.

Stuff the chicken breasts.  Pull back the loose fillet on the back of the breast and use a knife to slice a long pocket.

Cut the chilled butter into four and insert into the pocket, then crumble in a rasher of crispy bacon.  Fold and seal back the chicken, completely covering the butter so it becomes a wrapped parcel.

Preheat oven to 350°F (180°C).

Place flour in a shallow bowl, whisk the eggs in another and put breadcrumbs and a pinch of seasoning into a third.  Evenly coat each chicken breast in flour, then beaten egg, letting any excess drip off, and finally, turn them in the breadcrumbs, repeating until all four are evenly coated.

Shallow-fry in ¾ inch (20 mm) of sunflower oil on a medium to high heat until lightly golden (should take no more than 2-3 minutes), then transfer to a tray and bake in the oven until cooked through (typically around 10-12 minutes).  The alternative method is to bake them completely in the oven and skip the frying process; this requires drizzling them with olive oil and baking for about 20 minutes; taste will be the same but they won’t have the golden surface texture.

While cooking, peel and roughly chop the potatoes and cook in a large pan of boiling salted water until tender (typically 12-15 minutes).

Chop up broccoli and add it to the potatoes for the last 8-odd minutes of cooking.  Drain and leave to steam dry, then return to the pan and mash with a knob of butter and a pinch of salt and pepper.

Dollop the mash on the serving plates, placing a Kiev atop each. Lightly dress the spinach leaves or rocket in a little oil and lemon juice, then sprinkle over the top as garnish. Serve with a wedge of lemon.

Formalism

Formalism (pronounced fawr-muh-liz-uhm)

(1) Strict adherence to, or observance of, prescribed or traditional forms, as in music, poetry and art.

(2) In religion, a strong attachment to external forms and observances.

(3) In philosophy (ethics), a doctrine that acts are in themselves right or wrong regardless of consequences.

(4) In mathematics (formal logic), a doctrine that mathematics, including the logic used in proofs, can be based on the formal manipulation of symbols without regard to their meaning (the mathematical or logical structure of a scientific argument as distinguished from its subject matter; the theory a statement has no meaning but that its symbols, regarded as physical objects, exhibit a structure that has useful applications).

(5) A scrupulous or excessive adherence to outward form at the expense of inner reality or content

(6) In Marxist criticism, scrupulous or excessive adherence to artistic technique at the expense of social values etc; also a view adopted by some non-Marxist critical theorists).

(7) In performance art, theatre a deliberately stylized mode of production.

(8) In both structural engineering and computer science, the notation, and its structure, in (or by) which information is expressed.

1830–1840: The construct was formal + -ism.  Formal was from the Middle English formel, from the Old French formel, from the Latin formalis, from forma (form) of unknown origin but possibly from the Etruscan morma, from the Ancient Greek μορφή (morphḗ) (shape, fashion, appearance, outward form, contour, figure), dissimilated as formīca and possibly formīdō.  The –ism suffix was from the Ancient Greek –ismos & -isma noun suffixes, often directly, often through the Latin –ismus & -isma, though sometimes through the French –isme or the German –ismus, all ultimately from the Greek.  It appeared in loanwords from Greek, where it was used to form action nouns from verbs and on this model, was used as a productive suffix in the formation of nouns denoting action or practice, state or condition, principles, doctrines, a usage or characteristic, devotion or adherence (criticism; barbarism; Darwinism; despotism; plagiarism; realism; witticism etc).  Although actual use of the word formalism dates only from its adoption (1830s) in critical discourse, disputes related to the matter can be found in texts since antiquity in fields as diverse as agriculture, literature and theology.  Formalism is a noun, formalist is a noun & adjective, formalistic is an adjective and formalistically is an adverb; the usual noun plural is formalists.

Comrade Stalin, Comrade Shostakovich and Formalism

Comrade Stalin (1878–1953; leader of the USSR, 1924-1953) didn’t invent the regime’s criticism of formalism but certainly made it famous after comrade Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) was denounced in the Soviet newspaper Pravda (Truth) in January 1936, after the Moscow performance of his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District.  Stalin didn’t like music he couldn’t whistle and the complex strains of Shostakovich’s opera, sometimes meandering, sometimes strident, certainly didn’t permit that; he labeled the composition формализм (formalism), "chaos instead of music", a self-indulgence of technique by a composer interested only in the admiration of other composers, an audience of no value in the school of Soviet realism.  It’s believed the Pravda article may have been written by Stalin himself and he used the word "formalism" in the sense it was understood English; formality being the observance of forms, formalism the disposition to make adherence to them an obsession.  To Stalin, the formal rules of composition were but a means to an end and the only legitimate end was socialist realism; anything other than that "an attack on the people".  Lest it be thought the defeat of fascism in the Great Patriotic War (1941-1945) might have mellowed his views in such matters, Stalin at the 1948 party congress made sure the point was hammered home in the Communist Party's brutish way:  

"Comrades, while realistic music is written by the People's composers, formalistic music is written by composers who are against the People.  Comrades, one must ask why it is that realistic music is always written by composers of the People? The People's composers write realistic music simply due to the fact that being by nature realists right to their very core, they simply cannot help writing music that is realistic, while those anti-People composers, being by nature unrepentant formalists, cannot help... cannot help... cannot help writing music that is formalistic."

Comrade Stalin signing death warrants.

In the Soviet Union, producing or performing stuff hated by Stalin was not good career move.  Shostakovich completed his Fourth Symphony in C minor, Opus 43, in May 1936 and, even after the attack in Pravda, planned to stage its premiere in Leningrad December but found the orchestra unwilling to risk incurring the Kremlin’s wrath and almost as soon as rehearsals began, the orchestra's management cancelled the performance, issuing a statement saying comrade Shostakovich had withdrawn the work.  Actual responsibility for the decision remains unclear but it was certainly in accord with the views of the Kremlin and not until 1961, almost a decade on from Stalin’s death, was it performed.

Comrade Shostakovich at his dacha.

Shostakovich became a realist, his response to denunciation the melodic Fifth Symphony in D minor, Opus 47.  Premiered in November 1937 in Leningrad, it was a resounding triumph, attracting a standing ovation that lasted more than thirty minutes.  The following January, just before its first performance in Moscow, an article, under the composer’s name, appeared in the local newspaper Vechernyaya Moskva in which he described the Fifth Symphony as "…a Soviet artist's creative response to justified criticism."  Whether Shostakovich actually wrote the piece isn’t known but there’s never been any doubt it’d never have been published without Stalin’s approval and the success of the Fifth Symphony re-personed Shostakovich.  Whatever it lacked in glasnost (openness), it made up for in perestroika (restructuring) and the party engineered his rehabilitation as carefully as it had his fall a couple of years earlier, anxious to show how those bowing its demands could be rewarded as easily and fully as dissidents could be punished.