Mikhail Gorbachev's Failure Of Censorship In Russia

When Mikhail Gorbachev assumed control of the Soviet Union upon the death of Konstantin Chernenko in 1985, the nation was in a deep hole dug by Stalin’s past regime. Though Stalin had been dead for decades, his successors had done little to reverse the results of his tyrannical rule. The Soviet Union was left in a state which barely resembled communism at all, and could best be described as repressive totalitarian control. The whole of the Union was under a thick fog of censorship, oppression, and economic stagnation. Under previous regimes’ heavy-handed monitoring of Russians, freedom of expression was essentially a fairy tale; press was controlled by the government, books criticizing communism or Soviet leaders were censored, and outside

He soon devised a new branch of his perestroika called glasnost. Translating to “openness”, glasnost was a dramatic restructuring of the overbearing censorship of previous Soviet administrations. Under this new system, citizens were encouraged to not only discuss Soviet government and leaders, but to openly criticize them. The press had newfound freedom to report on stories that previously would have been silenced, and soon newspapers such as Pravda began covering massive Soviet failures like the Chernobyl disaster. The arts flourished as well; Western influence spread to Russia, particularly evident in the rising popularity of rock and jazz music, and censored books from past decades began to

Because of the extreme diversity of the Soviet Union’s satellite nations - having 92 different nationalities and over 100 recognized languages - ethnic tensions were high under the unified, Russian-centric government. The heavy-handed, oppressive regimes of previous decades did well to quell any potential uprisings from satellites, but under Gorbachev’s lax rule of openness, pressure began to rise. Within a year of Gorbachev legalizing the creation of other political parties, all 15 Soviet satellites had revolted against Soviet rule and voted for complete independence. By the end of 1991, the Soviet Union ceased to exist, Gorbachev had resigned, and Boris Yeltsin had taken over as the new president of