Question

Soviet Leader Gorbachev began making changes in his country in an attempt to improve conditions there. These included "glasnost" which means openness of government and _________ which involved restructuring the economy to replace defense spending and start producing goods needed by the people.

Answer 1

Answer: the policy or practice of more open consultative government and wider dissemination of information, initiated by leader Mikhail Gorbachev from 1985.

Explanation: In the Russian language the word glasnost has several general and specific meanings. It has been used in Russian to mean "openness and transparency" since at least the end of the eighteenth century. In the Russian Empire of the late-19th century, the term was particularly associated with reforms of the judicial system, ensuring that the press and the public could attend court hearings and that the sentence was read out in public. In the mid-1980s, it was popularised by Mikhail Gorbachev as a political slogan for increased government transparency in the Soviet Union. For centuries", human rights activist Lyudmila Alexeyeva has explained, the word glasnost has been in the Russian language: "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."[2] In the mid-1960s, however, as Alexeyeva recounts, it acquired a new and topical importance.