In 1990, Mikhail Gorbachev (1931-2022) signed into law a press reform that reinforced existing commitments to speech and press freedoms, as articulated in the version of the Soviet Constitution adopted in 1977 under Leonid Brezhnev (1906-1982).

Televised footage of the USSR’s first Congress of People’s Deputies in 1989. So many Soviet citizens tuned in to the live broadcast that production rates fell nationwide.