Glasnost and the Leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev
"The 'Great Silence' was finally broken. Russia was like a person who had endured unimaginably terrible suffering as a child, then for many years was strictly forbidden ever to mention it, and who now at last, in middle age, was able to speak." -Adam Hochschild, author of The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin
Glasnost
Following Mikhail Gorbachev’s rise to power in 1985, a stream of media publications, books, and public events exposed communist lies and distortion and the legacy of Stalin's leadership was seriously investigated and re-examined.
"The words came pouring out. By 1987, previously forbidden books about the Stalin era began to appear, and in 1988 they became a flood. At public meetings, victims of the Great Purge stood, wept, and told their stories of torture, prison, and exile. Plays that had been forbidden for decades filled the country's stages, and powerful new documentary films raised unsettling questions about how the country could have let itself be mesmerized by Stalin for so long...From the country's Supreme Court and Politburo came announcement after announcement that famous revolutionaries shot after the show trials of the 1930s were now rehabilitated. The Politburo appointed a special subcommittee to study the repression of the Stalin era." -Adam Hochschild, author of The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin |
"I detest lies." Click on the image below to enlarge.
"...in the late 1980s, just as Mikhail Gorbachev began to lower barriers to free speech...I was struck by the ubiquitous tales of family tragedy stemming from the millions of arrests and incidents of persecution during the Stalin era. Some young people had been raised on vivid accounts of loss or imprisonment, whereas others were only then daring to ask reticent parents or grandparents where they had been during the purges." -Kathleen E. Smith, author of Remembering Stalin's Victims: Popular Memory and the End of the USSR |
Collapse of the Soviet Union |
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These astonishing revelations led to the delegitimation of Soviet communism, which was followed by the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
"Some may doubt that Stalin's Soviet Union could ever have been reformed, but Khrushchev was not among them - and neither, indeed, was Gorbachev. But after two decades of decay under Brezhnev, even he could not hold the country together." |
“Glasnost allowed for the first time the facts to be presented. The Soviet people soon realized why so much had been kept from them for so long. The USSR was in a mess but for the first time the people knew the truth and were demanding answers.”
-James Graham