The Dissident Roots of Glasnost

Abstract

The Russian word ‘glasnost’ has no precise English translation, a fact which impressed Vladimir Bukovskii on his arrival in the West in 1976:

For us there, in the Soviet Union, glasnost was a weapon, a means of struggle with lawlessness and tyranny. Indeed, a means of defence like the safety belt of a mountain climber. Yet the word does not exist in any European language, which substitute the word ‘publicity,’ distorting the sense of the concept. In the Russian word glasnost there is something cold and exact, like a surgical instrument, something very serious and solemn, from which immediately you imagine a duma clerk, bearded and in long robes, declaiming from the Spassky gate a government document. In essence, something like an oath to speak the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.²

Glasnost is not simply Gorbachev’s present invention, glasnost is the thing that his predecessors feared most of all, because behind the closed doors of the state arbitrary power can rule with impunity.

Julia Voznesenskaya, 1989¹