Gorbachev's Glasnost: The Soviet Media in the First Phase of Perestroika (Eastern European Studies (College Station, Tex.), No. 9.)

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Lester C. Thurow, economist and author, MIT.
"Gorbachev's Glasnost is a great place to start if one wants to understand what will probably be the central political puzzle of the second half of the 20th century."

Bostonia, Winter 1999-2000, p. 76.
Lenin viewed freedom of the press as bourgeois, and Soviet media remained strictly goal-oriented, the news censored and spun according to party line. Gibbs presents glasnost as a variation on that control. Under Gorbachev, the list of forbidden topics was shorter and the discretion of editors greater than in earlier decades, but he had considerable influence on who the editors were. The freedom afforded news and cultural media was also largely freedom to criticize the individuals and ideologies Gorbachev wished weakened. For instance, Gibbs says, the accident at Chernobyl was not announced until sixty-five hours after it occurred, with what little information later released accompanied by attacks on U.S. nuclear testing. Between 1985 and 1988, he reports, the nature of glasnost fluctuated with Gorbachev's "serious, if erratic, course of reforms." As the economy faltered, discontent grew, fanned by media freedom. In 1990, when Gorbachev tried to tighten his control of ! the press, it was too late.

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