What made Mikhail Gorbachev different from his predecessors?
I believe that Mikhail Gorbachev was the first leader who was willing to trust the people. Stalin of course had been the most tyrannical and dictatorial of leaders. Khrushchev who followed him was somewhat interested actually in tapping popular initiative. But Gorbachev understood that one could no longer have an ossified bureaucratic system that just lorded over the Russian peasant who was tied to the collective or state farms, or the Russian consumer who had so little to buy in the stores. Gorbachev believed that finally you had to have a politics based on trust in the peoples energy and the peoples initiative and that the people had to be brought into a renewed kind of socialism. Discuss the effects of glasnost. The most important and significant effects of glasnost were cultural. Stalin was now unmasked as the cruel tyrant that he had been, and there was now artistic freedom, there was now intellectual freedom. Censorship really ended by 1989 and for the first time many Soviet peop
