Glasnost

Glasnost ( ; , ) is a concept relating to openness and transparency. 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. In Russian, the word glasnost has long been used to mean 'openness' and 'transparency'. In the mid-1980s, it was popularised by Mikhail Gorbachev as a political slogan for increased government transparency in the Soviet Union within the framework of perestroika, and the word came to be used in English in the latter meaning.

==Historical usage== In the Russian Empire of the late-19th century, the term was used in its direct meanings of "openness" and "publicity" and applied to politics and the judicial system. Some reforms were introduced permitting attendance of the press and the public at trials. After some liberalization under Alexander II of Russia, the openness of trials started to be restricted again. Human rights activist Lyudmila Alexeyeva writes that the word glasnost has been in the Russian language for several hundred years as a common term: "It was in the dictionaries and lawbooks as long as there had been dictionaries and lawbooks. It was an ordinary, hardworking, non-descript word that was used to refer to a process, any process of justice or governance, being conducted in the open." In the mid-1960s it acquired a revived topical importance in discourse about the necessity of changing the Cold War era internal policy of the Soviet Union.