London – The burial of Mikhail Gorbachev this Saturday (3) without the honor of the head of state and the presence of his country’s president Vladimir Putin is the final chapter in the story of the differences in almost everything, including theory. and theory and practice on freedom of expression and press marked with the word “glasnost”.
Gorby, whom the western world almost affectionately called the burly leader of the Soviet Union between 1985 and 1991, left as one of his legacy the “openness” that ushered in an era of unimaginable freedoms in the oppressive times of Stalinism.
The former president, who died at the age of 91 in a Moscow hospital on the 30th, donated some of the prize money he received when he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990 to equip the newspaper that would serve as an example of defiance. To the censorship and repression of the Vladimir Putin regime, to Novaya Gazeta, whose editor Dmitry Muratov won the same award in 2021.
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Gorbachev’s Glasnost and Putin’s Memoir
But what exactly was glasnost? What were your goals? But what about his true legacy, as Vladimir Putin uses every weapon to silence dissident voices and ensure that narratives are followed, such as calling the war with Ukraine a “special operation”?
Vladimir Putin’s persecution of independent media, both local and international, did not begin with the invasion of Ukraine.
It is a process that has intensified in the last two years, with the inclusion of professionals and media outlets in the register of foreign agents hampering their work and the expulsion of reporters.
At the same time, state-owned media networks came under greater scrutiny abroad, and many were blocked after the war, leading to a wave of rematches.
All this is in stark contrast to what Mikhail Gorbachev practiced. But it wasn’t that simple, and not everything could have been planned.
In an article on the academic portal The Conversation, Aberystwyth analyzes what happened, with historical distance, more than 30 years after the Gorbachev government ended, the end of the Soviet Union, and at the worst moment of freedom of speech and press. The recent history of Russia.
He claims that although Gorbachev’s reforms were deep and far-reaching, it was unclear at the time whether they would be successful in changing Soviet political and economic systems.
“Progress was often uncertain and reversible. Opposition from powerful people with vested interests in maintaining the status quo was responsible for some of the delays.
Other times, he says, the pace of progress was influenced by Gorbachev’s own uncertainties about how fast and how far reform needed to go.
In Mathers’ view, this was the case for glasnost, which he saw as the bravest of all the policy changes Gorbachev introduced. But there was an interest.
“While talking about the importance of entrusting information to ordinary Soviet citizens, it was also clear that he was aiming at the targeted use of information – to draw attention to specific problems identified by the political leadership.
Gorbachev needed such publicity to build popular support that would help conservatives in the Communist Party overcome resistance to reform.”
The academic believes that glasnost failed its first test in April 1986, when it suffered a catastrophic accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant.
“The Politburo was slow to authorize the Soviet media to document the true extent of the disaster, prevent measures such as evacuation, and expose people in Ukraine and Belarus to high levels of radiation.”
Glasnost and Russian investigative journalism
But Mathers remembers that in the summer of 1986, Gorbachev “renewed his commitment to glasnost by appointing reformist journalists to edit newspapers, magazines, and literary magazines.”
He analyzes Gorbachev’s practice of appointing like-minded editors as part of what Soviet Union expert Archie Brown describes as “directed glasnost” in his book The Gorbachev Factor.
And it was accompanied by another intersecting process that Brown calls “glasnost from below.”
“Even though Glasnost was conceived by Gorbachev as a tool rather than free information for all, it soon made a living of its own.
State-appointed journalists themselves have used their new positions to push the boundaries of what is possible.”
The professor claims that the Kremlin acknowledged that personalities and politicians linked to the Leonid Brezhnev government of the 1970s were criticized for creating the conditions for recession.
But what about other periods of Soviet history? Can Stalin be criticized? Could it be Lenin? And criticism of Gorbachev and perestroika itself?
“The lack of boundaries between what is allowed and what is forbidden allowed journalists to take risks and marked the beginning of investigative journalism in the Soviet Union.
But the absence of these red lines that created opportunities also meant that journalists had no real way of knowing when exactly they had entered the danger zone.”
Taking risks for freedom of expression
Jennifer Mathers thinks anyone who tries to glasnost in Soviet journalism knows there’s danger. And she shares a personal story:
“When I was a student at Brown University in the late 1980s, I was lucky enough to hear journalist Vitaly Korotich talk about his experience in the weekly Ogonek magazine. Korotich was one of the risk journalists Gorbachev named after him.
The magazine soon gained notoriety for publishing critiques of the Soviet system. Korotich talked about the risks he and other journalists take on a daily basis, noting that he never knew whether the state would praise him as a hero or jail him as a traitor.
The professor says that public struggles over the limits of journalistic freedom have paved the way for society to exercise freedom of expression more broadly.
He remembers the release of films dealing with controversial topics, such as The Retention, which showed some of the horrors of Stalin’s repression.
Non-governmental organizations such as Memorial, which was founded in 1987 by nuclear physicist and dissident Andrei Sakharov, to conduct honest investigations into human rights abuses, were formed.
The televised debates of the newly elected Congress of People’s Deputies in 1989 presented Gorbachev and other members of the Soviet leadership with open questions, particularly about the war in Afghanistan.
Beginning in the late 1980s, there were popular protests calling for independence in Soviet republics, including Lithuania and Georgia.
But it had a price. According to the teacher, some protests were brutally suppressed by the Soviet security forces, who killed most of the protesters.
“Even at the Glasnost summit, Gorbachev saw the limits of freedom of speech, and it was the people of the republics that paid the price.”
He analyzes that the evolution of Glasnost reveals a paradox: Gorbachev needed the active participation of society in politics to carry out his reforms, which meant the granting of certain political freedoms.
But once granted, political freedoms can be very difficult to control.
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Here comes Putin and the end of what is left of Gorbachev’s glasnost
The professor argues that it didn’t take long for Vladimir Putin to regain state control over the political freedoms introduced by Gorbachev when he came to power in 1999, and that controlling the thriving independent media in Russia is high on the agenda.
Journalists’ access to Chechnya was severely restricted during Russia’s second war in that country (1999-2009), “in stark contrast to the extensive and uncensored coverage of the first war in the mid-1990s.”
Putin’s campaign for greater control over the oligarchs has allowed him to deal with the media empires most of them hold.
Vladimir Gusinsky lost the NTV television channel to the state energy company Gazprom in 2001.
In 2002, NTV canceled one of its most popular programs, Kukly, which was inspired by the British satirical comedy Spitting Image and portrayed Putin as a ‘dirty-mouthed’ baby.
This is what the journalistic world began to follow closely from that moment on, and after the war the whole world realized this: reporting the truth became more and more dangerous.
One of the facts that Jeniffer Matters remembers was the murder of Anna Politkovskaya, an investigative journalist from the Novaya Gazeta newspaper, attributed to the Russian state in 2006.
In 2021, Reporters Without Borders held a protest on Vladimir Putin’s birthday to commemorate the 15th anniversary of the crime.
Also Read | Activists celebrated Putin’s birthday with black balloons to commemorate the journalists killed under his rule.
According to the professor, the “final blow to Russia’s independent media” was the law passed earlier this year that made it illegal to distribute “fake news” about Russia’s war in Ukraine.
What has been witnessed in the last six months is a nightmare of closed newspapers, journalists in exile, those who have been tried and imprisoned, and a relentless siege of reliable sources of information.
Unfortunately, Russia went from state censorship to freedom of expression in the span of a generation and bounced back.”
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source: Noticias
