The Long Road To Freedom: Russia And Glasnost
Reviewed by John C. Campbell
The reader is well served by the author's confining himself to one aspect of the Gorbachev revolution, glasnost, for it enables him to go more deeply than other studies have into the effects of the new openness on various sectors of the establishment and of Soviet society. It is done with Laqueur's customary breadth of historical perspective, reaching back into the Russian past, and with his understanding of the role of the intelligentsia and of cultural change. Recent revelations and the new freedom of expression have at times been breathtaking, but Laqueur rightly stresses the limits of the process; in Gorbachev's words, it is "glasnost in the interest of socialism."
