The radicalization of Gorbachev's program and political strategy began in late 1986, with a signal going out that an expanded definition of glasnost’ was now the “Party line.” This indicated to editors of journals that censorship was to be relaxed and that they would be much freer to criticize. This was also the point at which Gorbachev started to extol the virtues of voluntary associations (“informals”). To dramatize, both at home and abroad, this expansion of the right of social forces to mobilize themselves autonomously, in December 1986 Gorbachev personally saw to the release from house arrest of the heroic symbol of dissidence, Andrei Sakharov. The following month he introduced to a plenary session of the Central Committee a wide-ranging program of “democratization,” which included proposals for multicandidate, secret elections of Party, soviet, and managerial officials. In the same month, he announced that the Soviet Union would open up to the world economy by allowing joint ventures with foreign enterprises on Soviet soil.

In short order there followed new laws on cooperatives and “individual labor activity,” which presaged new opportunities for legal entrepreneurial activity, and, in June 1987, a “Law on the State Enterprise” that signaled a push to dismantle the command economy. Almost all these initiatives in domestic policy were only first steps, a “foot in the door” approach, steps that delegitimized old values and justified in principle entirely new approaches to economic organization and the world economy. Almost all of them would be radicalized still further in the course of 1987–1988.