ecretary, suspended party activities, and placed reformers in charge of the military and KGB. After allowing Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania to become independent republics. Nationalist forces became stronger in the republics as the year went on. The USSR voted itself out of existence in December 1991, and Gorbachev resigned his position as president of the USSR.Glasnost During an interview in 1989 Mikhail Gorbachev is quoted as saying "I detest lies"(1.). It was this yearning for the truth that lead him to introduce the policy of glasnost literally openness in English. The liberal press exploited this leeway and continuously challenged its boundaries. Whole periods of Soviet history was changed by glasnost. Stalin, Brezhnev and Cherenko previously great leaders were unmasked as the brutal oppressive murders they really were. Only Lenin remained sacrosanct. Most telling of all, the school history exams for 1988 were cancelled. So many conventional wisdom's had been overturned in the previous months that the existing Soviet history books became useless. This change was not totally accepted by radicals or hardliners. The radicals wished to go further, faster and were exemplified in such illegal publications as Glasnost. Hardliners tried to retain their grip on people's minds by frequent attacks on the radicals in the conservative press. Prada the flagship Communist Party newspaper thundered "that extremists and nationalists were hiding their true face behind a mask of commitment to perestroika."(2.) While glasnost did allow discussion to take place it is clear from the exert that controls were placed on the discussion. The arrest and harassment of the more radical papers staff and the removal of material from libraries still ensured the attacks found the right targets. The early years of glasnost and thus the early years of freedom of speech in the USSR are described and...
