Glasnost
1980s Soviet policy promoting openness and transparency in government and scrutiny of leaders by the mass media
Glasnost ( GLAZ-nost; Russian: гласность, IPA: [ˈɡlasnəsʲtʲ] ) is a concept relating to openness and transparency. It has several general and specific meanings, including a policy of maximum openness in the activities of state institutions and freedom of information and the inadmissibility of hushing up problems. In Russian, the word glasnost has long been used to mean 'openness' and 'transparency'. In the mid-1980s, it was popularised by Mikhail Gorbachev as a political slogan for increased government transparency in the Soviet Union within the framework of perestroika, and the word came to be used in English in the latter meaning.
Historical usage
In the Russian Empire of the late-19th century, the term was used in its direct meanings of "openness" and "publicity" and applied to politics and the judicial system. Some reforms were introduced permitting attendance of the press and the public at trials. After some liberalization under Alexander II of Russia, the openness of trials started to be restricted again. Human rights activist Lyudmila Alexeyeva writes that the word glasnost has been in the Russian language for several hundred years as a common term: "It was in the dictionaries and lawbooks as long as there had been dictionaries and lawbooks. It was an ordinary, hardworking, non-descript word that was used to refer to a process, any process of justice or governance, being conducted in the open." In the mid-1960s it acquired a revived topical importance in discourse about the necessity of changing the Cold War era internal policy of the Soviet Union.
In the USSR
The dissidents
On 5 December 1965 the Glasnost rally took place in Moscow, considered to be a key event in the emergence of the Soviet civil rights movement.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Glasnost” as 1980s Soviet policy promoting openness and transparency in government and scrutiny of leaders by the mass media. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the history & society register because the source frames it as 1980s Soviet policy promoting openness and transparency in government and scrutiny of leaders by the mass media. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q173100. The Library of Congress control number is sh89002248. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1965.
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This entry incorporates text from “Glasnost” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.