Liberalisation of the Media

• Gorbachev allowed greater freedom of expression in the Soviet media to create an alliance between Communists, reformers, and Russian intellectuals.
• Yakovlev was appointed to head the media after the 1986 Congress and appointed new radical editors to head the Moskovskie Novosti, the Moscow News.
• Newspapers began to publish accounts of Stalin's atrocities and admitted problems in the USSR.
• Yakovlev permitted the publication of banned books, plays, and films by anti-communist intellectuals, including the highly critical film Repentance.
• Gorbachev released dissidents from prison and invited Andrei Sakharov to Moscow from exile in Gorky to support political reform in December 1986.