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In Russian language the word glasnost has several general and specific meanings. Its meaning "publicity" in the sense "the state of being open to public knowledge" has been used in Russian at least since the end of the 18th century. In the Russian Empire of the later 19th century the latter meaning was particularly associated with reforms of the judicial system, ensuring that the press and the public could attend court hearings and that the sentence was also read out in public. It was revived and made popular again in the 1980s by Mikhail Gorbachev as a slogan for increased government transparency.
The demand for glasnost was revived in the mid-1960s on the eve of the Sinyavsky–Daniel trial in Moscow. On 5 December 1965 protestors gathered on Pushkin Square in central Moscow (at what became known as the Glasnost Meeting) to demand that the Soviet authorities guarantee an open trial (glasny sud) for Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel in accordance with the Russian Federation Code of Criminal Procedure (1961). This meant admitting the media, including foreign correspondents, to the trial, as well as the public, including relatives and friends of the accused. From then on this would be a regular, but only sometimes successful, demand from those who became known as dissidents. In 1975, for example, rather than travel to Oslo to collect his Nobel Peace Prize, Andrei Sakharov stood outside a courthouse in Vilnius (Lithuanian SSR) demanding access to the trial of human rights activist Sergei Kovalyov.
In 1986 the term was revived by Mikhail Gorbachev as a generalized appeal for increased openness and transparency in government institutions and activities in the Soviet Union. Critics aware of the term's recent history regarded the Soviet authorities' new slogan as a vague and limited alternative to more basic liberties: according to Alexei Simonov of the Glasnost Defence Foundation, "Glasnost is a tortoise crawling towards freedom of speech". (Full article...)