In the first half of the eighties in the USSR there was a frequent change of party leaders: Brezhnev, Andropov, then Chernenko. The reason why the general secretaries left their post was a valid one, death, and the reasons for death, in turn, were also valid - advanced age and the numerous ailments associated with it. And so, in 1985, at the plenum of the Central Committee, a new General Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU, Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev, was elected. By the standards of the then leadership, he was defiantly young, he had just recently turned 54, nine days before the meeting.
The new leader of the party, and therefore of the country, understood that the world socialist system, and, in particular, the Soviet Union, had big problems. The economy is inefficient, people drink a lot of alcohol, and in general everything is somehow wrong … And he began to act.
After a month, the citizens of the USSR learned that acceleration is not only something that is caused by force, but also this way of working.
An anti-alcohol campaign soon began, as a result of which they did not drink less, but the wine industry and viticulturesuffered. Then came the policy of glasnost. First things first.
So, acceleration, glasnost and democratization were all summed up in the word "perestroika", which was spoken in touching accents by Western leaders without translation into their native languages, like the word "satellite" in 1957.
Such rapid turns could not but have a devastating effect on the decrepit socialist system, but it was Gorbachev's policy of glasnost that ultimately led to its complete collapse.
Of course, they didn’t invent another part termin order to destroy the country. The original plan of the reformers from the Central Committee was different, it was just necessary to touch up history, identify individual shortcomings, but leave the fundamental foundations intact, act according to the principle “Stalin is bad, but Lenin is good.” If under Stalin they shot Bukharin, for example, it was because the latter was very smart. And as proof, a quote from Lenin's Blue Notebook. Yezhov does not count, he is on the case.
But even such a policy of glasnost irritated some members of the Central Committee and even ordinary citizens, and the well-known article by Nina Andreeva in Pravda became their manifesto.
Trying to put the flow of information under control, one of the leaders of the CPSU, I. Polozkov, even agreed that the policy of glasnost is, of course, good, but only communists have the right to it.
Feeling the weakness of power, many leadersopposition currents, most often nationalists, began to bend their line, sowing destruction and death. This happened in Nagorno-Karabakh, Tbilisi and other hotspots. Attempts to restore order by force led to even worse results. Ultimately, the majority of the population realized that there could be no "socialism with a human face". His face does not change. This explains the failure of the coup attempt in 1991 and Yeltsin's victory.
Thus ended the communist era, and along with it, the politics of glasnost. Its achievements and costs can now be analyzed. The first can be attributed to the interest of the population in the printed word, which arose suddenly at the end of the 80s, albeit for a short time. And to the second - the unthinkable chaos into which the country was plunged for twenty years, and the consequences of which we will all be feeling for a long time to come…
