Glasnost: Sakharov Released, Censorship Eased

In December 1986, Gorbachev personally telephoned Andrei Sakharov in his Gorky exile to tell him he was free to return to Moscow — a symbolic reversal of Soviet dissident policy that accompanied a broader glasnost push: an easing of press censorship, the release of hundreds of political prisoners, and the first serious public debate about Stalin-era crimes in state media since Khrushchev's Thaw three decades earlier.