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
Foreign relations of the Soviet Union of the Communist Party. The foremost objectives of Soviet foreign policy had been the maintenance and enhancement of national security and the maintenance of hegemony over Eastern Europe. Relations with the United States and Western Europe were also of major concern to Soviet foreign policy makers and, much as with the United States, relations with individual Third World states were at least partly determined by the proximity of each state to the border and to estimates of strategic significance. When Mikhail Gorbachev succeeded Konstantin Chernenko as General Secretary of the Communist Party in 1985, it signaled a dramatic change in