whom we can do business." Gorbachev gave the Soviet Union and the World two slogans: perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness). PERESTROIKA held out the promise of reorganizing the State and society. For instance, individual initiative would be revived and there would be more technology and a higher standard of living. Soviet citizens were to become more involved at the grass roots level and participate in national affairs. Glasnost was the corrective held up to Stalinist excesses. Openness would permit the open discussion of the nation's problems and it would rid public thinking of propaganda and lies. Both perestroika and glasnost, as Gorbachev understood them, would transform Soviet society into a true democracy. Academics, writers, intellectuals and artists responded enthusiastically, as did most western politicians. Sakharov rose to political prominence and Solzhenitsyn was invited home. Soviet fiction that was produced and subsequently banned in the 1920s and 30s was now published for the first time. George Orwell's novels Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four were now published by Soviet printing houses. Some new novels not only told the truth about the past, but also tried to explain it. In many cases this amounted to speculation about Stalin's real nature and motivation, as in Anatoli Rybakov's celebrated novel, Children of the Arbat. Rybakov, who had won a Stalin Prize in 1951, tried to get the book published in the 1960s but failed. It was finally published in Russian in 1987. Meanwhile, historians who depended on archives had always had a more difficult time in telling the truth. Nevertheless, after a slow start, new histories began to appear and new light was shed on the recent past. In some cases, surviving participants of the Stalinist purges were interviewed, and in other cases, long-suppressed documents were published for the first time. Trotsky's works were now publicly examined but not unsurprisingly, they w...
