Communist Party of the Soviet Union reinvigorated the party ideology by adding new concepts and updating older ones. A positive consequence of this was the allowance of "pluralism of thought" and a call for the establishment of "socialist pluralism" (literally, socialist democracy). He introduced a policy of "glasnost" (Russian: "openness", "transparency") in 1986, which led to a wave of unintended democratization. According to Russian scholar Archie Brown, the democratization of the Soviet Union brought mixed blessings to Gorbachev; it helped him to weaken his conservative opponents within the party but brought out accumulated grievances which had been oppressed during the previous decades. In reaction to these
The Age of Openness international perspective." While Dikötter does not deny the devastation caused by the Chinese Civil War or the Japanese invasion, he nonetheless argues that the Republican period was a "golden age of openness" in which the country was making substantial progress toward modernity, boldly experimenting with ideas and market reforms, and building vast infrastructure projects. Historian Jonathan Spence wrote that "The Age of Openness" ""presents a cornucopia of graphic examples to show that China in the first half of the twentieth century, far from being in a state of decay that called for revolutionary action, was in fact a vibrant and