Attacks on the Press: Journalism on the World's Front Lines, 2015 Edition

20. The Death of Glasnost: How Russia’s Attempt at Openness Failed

By Ann Cooper

Russian opposition leader and anti-corruption blogger Alexei Navalny, right, talks with his brother and codefendant Oleg inside a defendants’ cage during a court hearing in Moscow on December 30, 2014.

Source: Reuters/Sergei Karpukhin

Before Maidan, before Tahrir Square, before the “color revolutions” that overthrew entrenched autocrats, there was the Soviet revolution of the late 1980s.

Perhaps it should be called the Stealth Revolution. This revolution unfolded over years, not weeks or months, and not through angry demonstrations but in newspapers and on ...