Gorbachev speaks with state media leaders

In the weeks following the closing of the Twenty-Seventh Party Congress in Moscow, Mikhail Gorbachev convened four meetings with select groups of the Party-state apparatus to continue the discussion about the transformation of Soviet society during Perestroika. One group included media workers, who met with the General Secretary on March 14. In this meeting, Gorbachev called media workers the lynchpin of the success of reform. They played a key role, he stated, in waking Soviet people up and helping activate the population. The meeting contents of this meeting filtered through each media organization, as editors brought the General Secretary’s message to local Party committees and planned ways in which each media outlet could reinvigorate its work, its connection to its audience, and motivate Soviet people to take part in the broad social reforms unfolding around them.
The media was the cornerstone of glasnost in the Gorbachev Era. Media organizations played an enormous role in shaping the public sphere of Perestroika and the immediate post-Soviet period. Gorbachev’s March 1986 meeting with media leadership underscores that the revitalization of Soviet media during Perestroika was a revolution, but not a revolt. Throughout Perestroika, state-sponsored media remained committed to the broader goal of activating the Soviet public, and experimented with means of doing so. Throughout Perestroika, the media maintained its traditional Soviet institutional frameworks, working in cooperation with state leaders, censors, and the Party. Even within these bounds, public discourse expanded at a breathtaking pace.