Glasnost in Eastern Europe

Lech Walesa says that glasnost makes him uneasy. “In my twenty-five years as an electrician I’ve had to tighten and loosen many screws. When tightening them I’ve broken only one, but I must have broken several hundred in my attempts to loosen them. And Gorbachev is loosening and loosening….”

During the last few years, democratic oppositionists in Eastern Europe have been debating glasnost: what it means and how they should respond to it. Several mag...