Glasnost

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.

[citation needed] Protesters on Pushkin Square led by Alexander Yesenin-Volpin demanded access to the closed trial of Yuly Daniel and Andrei Sinyavsky.

Andrei Sakharov, for example, did not travel to Oslo to receive his Nobel Peace Prize due to his public protest outside a Vilnius court building demanding access to the 1976 trial of Sergei Kovalev, an editor of the Chronicle of Current Events and prominent rights activist.

Alexei Simonov, president of the Glasnost Defence Foundation, makes a critical definition of the term in suggesting it was "a tortoise crawling towards Freedom of Speech".

Gorbachev often appealed to glasnost when promoting policies aimed at reducing corruption at the top of the Communist Party and the Soviet government, and moderating the abuse of administrative power in the Central Committee.

[citation needed] While associated with freedom of speech, the main goal of this policy was to make the country's management transparent, and circumvent the holding of near-complete control of the economy and bureaucracy of the Soviet Union by a concentrated body of officials and bureaucratic personnel.

[citation needed] During Glasnost, Soviet history under Stalin was re-examined; censored literature in the libraries was made more widely available;[10][11] and there was a greater freedom of speech for citizens and openness in the media.

[25] This however has been the subject of ongoing controversy in contemporary Russia owing to heightened governmental interventions restricting access to information for Russian citizens, including internet censorship.