PERESTROIKA AND GLASNOST

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• But throughout his obituaries, two specific words will likely be repeated: glasnost and perestroika. Those two transliterations of Russian words were synonymous with his campaign for reforming Soviet society through policies, and the latter was the title of his 1982 book Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World.
• Shortly after Gorbachev became the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1985, he ramped up talk about glasnost—meaning “openness,” particularly openness of information—and perestroika, meaning a “restructuring,” specifically of the Communist economy and political system.
• The terms went hand-in-hand because, together, the reforms they described would make the Soviet Union more democratic and incorporate some features of capitalism to revitalize the economy.