On April 8, 1986, speaking to workers at the Volga Automobile Plant in Tolyatti, Mikhail Gorbachev publicly used the word “perestroika” for the first time. That political course opened a six-year period that changed how millions of Soviet citizens understood the state and ultimately ended with the collapse of the USSR.
Alexander Gorbachev, an editor at Novaya Gazeta Europe, assembled a selection of nonfiction books, films, and podcasts that help interpret perestroika: whether it was liberation, a historical catastrophe, or a missed democratic chance.
Among the central works is a book by anthropologist Alexei Yurchak, who explains the system’s breakdown through the everyday experience of late Soviet life. In his reading, citizens increasingly stopped taking ideology literally and instead lived alongside the authorities rather than with them or openly against them.
The list also includes David Remnick’s book, drawn from his Moscow reporting in the late 1980s and awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1994, as well as the diaries of Gorbachev aide Anatoly Chernyaev, which portray perestroika politics as the product of personal choices, doubts, and conflicts inside the leadership.
A special place is given to Natalia Rostova’s digital project on glasnost and Soviet media, where perestroika appears as a chronicle of the press learning freedom. Canadian scholar Guillaume Sauve examines why the word “democracy” in 1990s Russia became almost a term of abuse and how later authoritarian practices were already emerging in the late perestroika period.
Among screen works, the article highlights Adam Curtis’s seven-hour series Traumazone, which presents the Soviet collapse and the post-Soviet years as a human trauma. The historical studies mentioned also include works by Stephen Kotkin, Vladislav Zubok, and Serhii Plokhy, along with a book about Memorial, which grew out of perestroika-era debates on repression and historical memory.