Glasnost

I have lived long enough now to be able to look back over the world events of my lifetime, and wonder which will turn out to be truly significant.  I watched Neil Armstrong step onto the surface of the moon .  (I remember sitting in front of a small black and white TV with my American neighbours - their mother made apple pie; my mother made apple crumble).  Later, the Iron Curtain came down with the Wall in Berlin.  Closer to the present was the attack on the Twin Towers in New York.

I often wonder at the changes that happened in the vast country I grew up to know as the Soviet Union.  The Soviet Union was a mystery to us, and its death possibly makes it more mysterious for us now.  The arrival of a new leader in Mikhail Gorbachov marked the beginning of the end for the Soviet Union, and he introduced two Russian words into the English language.  The first "Glasnost" has, for us, the meaning of public openness, of accountability, of a softening of ideological rigidity.  However, in Russian the word derives from "glas" meaning "voice", and "glasit" meaning "say" or "read."  In Russian then, "glasnost" means no more than "publicity".  The other word was "Perestroika" which means "reorganisation" or "reconstruction." There is no hint in the word of what kind of reconstruction was implied - no hint of an abandonment of a whole system.  Perhaps, in the West, we read more into the words "glasnost" and "perestroika" than was ever there...