TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/010190/01019005.000

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 8.4 KB | 165 lines

                                                                                MAN OF THE DECADE, Page 42

GORBACHEV

The Unlikely Patron of Change


By Lance Morrow


    The 1980s came to an end in what seemed like a magic act,
performed on a world-historical stage. Trapdoors flew open, and
whole regimes vanished. The shell of an old world cracked, its
black iron fragments dropping away, and something new, alive,
exploded into the air in a flurry of white wings.

    Revolution took on a sort of electronic lightness of being.
A crowd of half a million Czechoslovaks in Wenceslas Square
would powder into electrons, stream into space at the speed of
light, bounce off a satellite and shoot down to recombine in
millions of television images around the planet.

    The transformation had a giddy, hallucinatory quality, its
surprises tumbling out night after night. The wall that divided
Berlin and sealed an international order crumbled into
souvenirs. The cold war, which seemed for so long part of the
permanent order of things, was peacefully deconstructing before
the world's eyes. After years of numb changelessness, the
communist world has come alive with an energy and turmoil that
have taken on a bracing, potentially anarchic life of their own.
Not even Stalinist Rumania was immune.

    The magician who set loose these forces is a career party
functionary, faithful communist, charismatic politician,
international celebrity and impresario of calculated disorder
named Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev. He calls what he is doing
-- and permitting -- a revolution. His has (so far) been a
bloodless revolution, without the murderous, conspiratorial
associations that the word has carried in the past. In novel
alliance with the glasnost of world communications, Gorbachev
became the patron of change: Big Brother's better twin. His
portraits, like icons at a saint's-day festival, waved amid a
swarm of Czechs. The East German young chanted "Gorby! Gorby!"
to taunt the police.

    The world has acquired simultaneously more freedom and more
danger. At the beginning of the age of exploration, a
navigator's map would mark unknown portions of the great ocean
with the warning HERE BE MONSTERS. Gorbachev knows about the
monsters, about the chaos he may have to struggle across, a
chaos that he even helped to create.

    The potential for violence, and even for the disintegration
of the Soviet order, is enormous. The U.S.S.R. is a vast amalgam
of nationalities that have always been restive under the
imperial Soviet system. To mix the politics of openness and the
economics of scarcity is a messy and dangerous experiment.

    Gorbachev and his reformist allies in Eastern Europe have
managed to suppress at least one monster -- the state's
capacity for terrible violence against its citizens. The Chinese
and, until last week, the Rumanians were not so lucky. The
Chinese students carried portraits of the Soviet leader, and
they were shouting, "In Russia they have Gorbachev; in China we
have whom?" The yin and yang of 1989: tanks vs. glasnost, the
dead hand of the past vs. Gorbachev's vigorous, risky plunge
into the future. Gorbachev is a hero for what he would not do
-- in fact, could not do, without tearing out the moral wiring
of his ambitions for the future. In that sense, as in so many
others, the fallen Rumanian tyrant Nicolae Ceausescu played the
archvillain.

    Gorbachev has been a powerful, increasingly symbolic
presence in the world's imagination since he first came to power
in 1985. But what exactly does he symbolize? Change and hope for
a stagnant system, motion, creativity, an amazing equilibrium,
a gift for improvising a stylish performance as he hang glides
across an abyss. Mikhail Gorbachev, superstar: the West went
predictably overboard in what one skeptic called its "Gorbasms."

    But Gorbachev and his program of perestroika are far less
popular at home. Estee Lauder and Christian Dior opened
exclusive shops on Gorky Street. Meanwhile, soap, sugar, tea,
school notebooks, cigarettes, sausage and other meats, butter,
fruits and vegetables, and even matches are scarce. Only rubles
are plentiful. As Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in his treatise
on the French Revolution, "The most perilous moment for a bad
government is when it seeks to mend its ways. Only consummate
statecraft can enable a king to save his throne when, after a
long spell of oppressive rule, he sets to improving the lot of
his subjects." Chaos rides in on rising expectations.

    Right now, in the dead of the Russian winter, Gorbachev may
have reached his own most dangerous moment. Nonetheless, with
remarkable imagination and daring, he has embarked on a course,
perhaps now irreversible, that is reshaping the world. He is
trying to transform a government that was not just bad or inept
but inherently destructive, its stupidity regularly descending
into evil. He has been breaking up an old bloc to make way for
a new Europe, altering the relationship of the Soviet empire
with the rest of the world and changing the nature of the empire
itself. He has made possible the end of the cold war and
diminished the danger that a hot war will ever break out between
the superpowers. Because he is the force behind the most
momentous events of the '80s and because what he has already
done will almost certainly shape the future, Mikhail Gorbachev
is TIME's Man of the Decade.

    Some people regard Gorbachev as a hero because they believe
he is presiding over the demise of a loathsome ideology. But he
does not mean to abolish communism. On the contrary, he wants
to save it by transforming it. The supreme leader of an
atheistic state was baptized as a child. Now, in a sense,
Gorbachev means to accomplish the salvation of an entire society
that has gone astray. Yet he has not found an answer to the
question of how communism can be redeemed and still be
communism.

    Gorbachev is playing Prospero in a realm ruled by Caliban
for the past 72 years. He aspires not merely to correct the
"deformations of socialism," as he calls the legacies of
Stalinism and the incompetences of centralized economic
planning. Gorbachev's ambition is more comprehensive: to repair
deformations of the Russian political character that go back
centuries. The Renaissance and Enlightenment never arrived in
Russia. Feudalism lived on, and endures now in the primitive
authoritarianism of the Soviet system.

    Sigmund Freud once said that human self-esteem received
three great blows from science. First, Copernicus proved that
the earth is not the center of the universe. Then Darwin showed
that man is not organically superior to animals; and finally,
psychoanalysis asserted that man is not "master in his own
house." The self-esteem of Soviet communism suffered all three
blows at once but lumbered on for years in a dusk of denial.
Despite the pretensions of Marx and Lenin, the system that bears
their name is manifestly not the ordained design of history, not
superior to all others, and not even the master of its own
house.

    Mikhail Gorbachev is the Copernicus, Darwin and Freud of
communism all wrapped in one. He wants his fellow citizens --
and his comrades -- at last to absorb this trinity of
disillusionments and reconcile themselves into a whole and
modern society.

    The November day before he met with the Pope in Rome (not
the least of the year's astonishments), Gorbachev said, "We need
a revolution of the mind." The metaphysics of global power has
changed. Markets are now more valuable than territory,
information more powerful than military hardware. For many
years, the Soviets lived in paranoid isolation, fearful of
Western culture (an old Russian tradition) and estranged from
it in somewhat the way that Ayatullah Khomeini's Iranians
quarantined themselves from the secular poisons of the West.
Peasant cultures shrink from foreign contamination.

    Gorbachev is a sort of Zen genius of survival, a nimble
performer who can dance a side step, a showman and manipulator
of reality, a suave wolf tamer. He has a way of turning
desperate necessities into opportunities and even virtues.

    Much more than that, Gorbachev is a visionary enacting a
range of complex and sometimes contradictory roles. He is
simultaneously the communist Pope and the Soviet Martin Luther,
the apparatchik as Magellan and McLuhan. The Man of the Decade
is a global navigator.