From 1987 onwards there was also advocacy of checks and balances, separation of powers, a state based upon the rule of law and a market economy. Some writers qualified these concepts by placing 'socialist' in front of them. Others did not. Since there was also, however, increasingly vigorous argument as to what constituted socialism (with the writer Chingiz Aitmatov using his speech to the First Congress of People's Deputies in 1989 to name, among other countries, Switzerland as a fine example of socialism!),[15] the use of 'socialist' was not the constraint upon debate it would have been in the Soviet past. From very early in the Gorbachev era one of the key concepts given emphasis was glasnost', meaning openness or transparency, although glasnost, like perestroika, was about to enter the English and other languages, such was the international impact of the changes in the Soviet Union. In each year that followed 1985 glasnost' became increasingly indistinguishable from freedom of speech. There were, nevertheless, occasions when glasnost' was conspicuous by its absence. The most notable was the disaster at the Chernobyl' nuclear power station in Ukraine on 26 April 1986. The news of what turned out to be the world's worst nuclear accident thus far came to Soviet citizens from the West by foreign radio (in a reversion to what was common in the unreformed Soviet system). It was not until 28 April that the accident was noted by Soviet television and much later before any detailed account was provided. Those within the Soviet Union who wished change to progress faster used Chernobyl', however, as an illustration of what was wrong with the system - from shoddy work at the nuclear plant, to the local attempt to cover up the scale of the disaster, to the reluctance of the Soviet leadership and mass media to provide prompt and accurate information about the catastrophe. The more reform-oriented parts of the mass media were soon carrying articles very critical of the absence of glasnost' on this occasion, a development that in itself would have been impossible prior to 1985 when even air crashes and some natural disasters in the Soviet Union went unreported in order to convey the impression that all was well on the home front. When, following Chernobyl', every catastrophe, whether natural (such as the Armenian earthquake in 1988) or man-made, was extensively reported and commented on, it appeared to some Soviet citizens that the incidence of misfortune had increased.
The growing freedom of speech was a mixed blessing for the General Secretary who had allowed it to happen. On the one hand, it served Gorbachev's interests that radical reformists were now free to criticise party and state bureaucrats who were opposed to change. On the other hand, almost every social and national group had an accumulation of grievances which had been impossible to air publicly in the unreformed Soviet system. These problems now spilled out into the open and overloaded the political agenda with highly contentious issues. Nowhere was that more true than in the sphere ofrelations among different nationalities, a topic on which more will be said later in the chapter.
Some of the new freedoms, which were soon to be taken for granted, represented a huge advance for Soviet citizens. Among the most important was the ending of the persecution of religion. A new religious tolerance prevailed and many places of worship were reopened. The year of the major turning point for this, as for much else, was 1988. In June the celebration of the millennium of Russian and Ukrainian Christianity tookplace with state support. New legislation gave the Church the right to publish literature and to engage in religious education. Other traditional religions of the Soviet Union also benefited from the change of policy. The jamming of Russian-language foreign broadcasts to the Soviet Union was ended and foreign travel for Soviet citizens became easier. By the last years of the Soviet Union financial constraints had become more important than bureaucratic obstacles to freedom of travel.
The Soviet press acquired a spectacular diversity in the Gorbachev era. There were weeklies such as Ogonek (Little light) and Moskovskie novosti (Moscow news) (with new editors and transformed content from the summer of 1986) that were in the vanguard of reform and glasnost' and publications such as the newspaper Sovetskaia Rossiia (Soviet Russia) or the Komsomol journal Molodaiiagvardiia (Young Guard), which combined political conservatism with Russian nationalism. One periodical which published information that would have been unthinkable in the past, and was at times in a battle of words even with the more tolerant authorities of the perestroika era, Argumenty i fakty (Arguments and facts), sold, at the peak of its circulation, as many as 33 million copies a week. In general, the circulation of newspapers and journals reached far greater heights during the perestroika period than either before or since in Russia. An entirely new and independent newspaper, which incorporated the word 'independent' in its title, Nezavisimaia gazeta, began publication in 1990.
Films which had failed to pass the censor in the unreformed Soviet system were now screened and made a great impact - none more so than the anti- Stalinist Georgian film, Pokoianie (Repentance), which went on general release in November 1986. The backlog of forbidden literature was even longer. The solid monthly literary journals were able to fill their pages with high-quality creative writing and revealing memoir material that had failed to pass the censor in times past. Many of the works of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn appeared in official Soviet publications for the first time, including his devastating indictment of the Soviet system, The Gulag Archipelago, which was serialised in the large-circulation literary monthly, Novyi mir (New world), in 1989. Other works deemed in the past to be especially dangerous, the very possession of which was a criminal offence - among them George Orwell's Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, Vasilii Grossman's Life and Fate, Doctor Zhivago (Boris Pasternak's Nobel prize-winning novel) and Anna Akhmatova's poem, Requiem, about the victims of Stalin - were published in large editions.
From early in the Gorbachev era criticism of Stalin and Stalinism - which had been banned in the Brezhnev years - resumed and the critiques became much more fundamental than Khrushchev's attack which had condemned some of Stalin's purges but did not question the system that had allowed him to get away with mass murder. It was in 1988 that the much bolder step, in the Soviet context, of criticising in print Marx and Lenin was taken. The first author to achieve this breakthrough was Aleksandr Tsipko in the pages of the popular science monthly, Nauka i zhizn' (Science and life). Tsipko, who had been brought into the Central Committee apparatus in 1986, was still working in the CPSU headquarters when he published a series of articles, beginning in November 1988, that were critical of the Bolsheviks and the consequences of their revolution. In his own words, he set the precedent of 'legal anti-Communism' and did so underthe protection of Central Committee Secretaries Yakovlev and Vadim Medvedev.[16] It is one of the paradoxes of the dismantling of the Communist system that the most decisive steps in that process were taken by high-ranking members of the Communist Party, including, crucially, the highest. These new freedoms, it is important to note, occurred at a time before Yeltsin was playing any part in national decision- making. Aleksandr Bovin rightly sees as one of Yeltsin's principal merits that he preserved the inheritance of freedom that Gorbachev introduced.[17] To see freedom of speech and publication as a product of post-Soviet Russia would be a serious distortion. The many new liberties were, on the contrary, among the most notable achievements of perestroika, although they contributed also to its ultimate undoing.
16
Alexander Tsipko, 'The Collapse of Marxism-Leninism', in Michael Ellman and Vladimir Kontorovich (eds.),