Glasnost

During the late 1980s, the leader of the Soviet Union ("U.S.S.R."), General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, introduced a social, and cultural policy called Glasnost (Russian: Глаcность, pronounced GLAHZ-nohst), which means "openness", ending seven decades of leftist politically correct censorship and cancel culture. Specifically, glasnost was a new Soviet policy allowing public discussion of political issues and a more free circulation of information.

Gorbachev began to promote this "openness" in public discussions about current and historical problems in the U.S.S.R. He acknowledged the brutality of the Stalin era, such as the Great Purges and the Katyn Massacre. Soviet leaders became more receptive of foreign leaders and the media, as a new period opened between the East and the West.

This opening of Soviet society to the West was one of the key events that eventually led to the collapse of the U.S.S.R. and its empire.

Glasnost also opened the gates to all possible types of hate speech, including active and open speculation on the idea of a Jewish conspiracy against the Soviet people. Ilya Yablokov observed while many Russians in the 1990s were keen on antisemitic conspiracy theories, after 2000 the extent of anti-Jewish slander in the public realm had rapidly gone down. Moreover, many high ranking politicians and elite journalists who were caught sharing antisemitic ideas in public apologized for their behavior.^[1]