TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/010190/01019005.002

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 10.0 KB | 193 lines

                                                                                MAN OF THE DECADE, Page 54

Gorbachev Touch


A Master politician, he generates a sense of purpose, making
himself the leader of regime and opposition alike

By Michael Kramer


    When Franklin Roosevelt set out to rescue capitalism from
the Depression, he had little use for rigidly defined
objectives. Improvisation corrected by feedback, that was
Roosevelt's way. "The country needs bold, persistent
experimentation," he declared. "Take a method and try it; if it
fails, admit it and try another. But above all try something."

    As Mikhail Gorbachev seeks to save Soviet communism by
transforming it, his political style resembles Roosevelt's. His
skills had better be at least as formidable as F.D.R.'s because
the challenge he faces is even more daunting. The Depression was
one rough patch in American history; for the Soviet Union,
history itself has been 72 years of bad road.

    Whatever happens to Gorbachev and his risky experiment, he
already qualifies as a political genius, if only because he
radiates a sense of purpose, motion, decisiveness and hope --
in short, "the vision thing." While Western experts bicker over
whether he knows what he is doing and where he is going,
Gorbachev gives the impression that he has as many answers as
they have questions. Part of his acumen is his sure feel for
what is truly important to his task and, conversely, a
breathtaking audacity in discarding what he believes is less
than vital. This year, without a great deal of visible hand
wringing, he decided that Soviet domination of Eastern Europe
was a drag on his campaign to restructure the Soviet Union.
Hence his emergence as the Commissar Liberator.

    Alexander Yakovlev, one of Gorbachev's closest Kremlin
aides, worked on a dissertation about F.D.R. while an exchange
student at Columbia University in 1958. "What struck Yakovlev
most about Roosevelt," says Loren Graham, a Sovietologist who
was a classmate at Columbia, "was how Roosevelt understood that
to save the system he had to give up much that wasn't central
in order to preserve the essence." The lifting of the Iron
Curtain shows that Yakovlev wasn't the only one who understood
that point.

    Gorbachev also appears to have learned, or sensed
instinctively, what Plato and Maimonides knew: the greatest
statesmen are therapists. A ruler becomes a leader and governs
legitimately only when he encourages people to face the truth
about themselves and therefore causes them to consent freely to
their governance.

    The Soviet people long ago became accustomed to leaders who
lied to them. By talking straight, Gorbachev has shocked his
subjects into a new kind of political engagement and civic
self-respect. What is more, he has given content to his
rhetoric. As a Bush adviser cracks, "I would be hard pressed to
see how a CIA mole planted in Moscow would be acting differently
if he were charged with dismantling the Soviet empire and
transforming the nature of aggressive communism."

    An American agent? Hardly. An American-style politician?
Definitely -- the kind the U.S. increasingly lacks. Snowing the
West has been easy for Gorbachev. Like Woody Allen's chameleon
character Zelig, Gorbachev has adopted many of the West's
favorite buzz words: stability, reasonable sufficiency, mutual
security, the unwinnability of nuclear war, interdependence,
human values, a civil society, the fate of the earth, the
endangered planet. He has also shown that he knows what these
words mean and that he means them himself when he uses them.

    But Gorbachev has done more than just master the lexicon of
Western liberalism. From the beginning he knew that the real
trick was to co-opt Western conservatives. In 1984 Ronald Reagan
was still in his evil-empire phase, so Gorbachev targeted the
free world's second toughest anti-Soviet, Margaret Thatcher, who
was quickly charmed. Gorbachev, said Thatcher, was a man with
whom the West could "do business."

    He has even tried to enlist God on his side. If a single
phrase captures the fear and hatred of the regime Gorbachev
represents, it is "Godless communism." So the top man in the
Kremlin has invoked God almost as brazenly as Bush wraps himself
in the American flag. In his first interview with the Western
press, he told TIME in 1985 that "God on high has not refused
to give us enough wisdom to find ways to bring us an improvement
in our relations." Since then he has embraced Christian values
of humanity, received Vatican representatives at the Kremlin,
and declared freedom of religion to be "indispensable" for
renewing the Soviet Union. Then, in early December, he became
a respectful if not quite penitent pilgrim. In a year that had
seen him reach out and touch foreign leaders from Cuba's Castro
to China's Deng Xiaoping, Gorbachev addressed the Pope as "Your
Holiness," and the Pope responded by blessing perestroika.

    The essence of politics is timing, and Gorbachev's sense of
when to push and when to retreat is exquisite. The difference
between his performances at the Reykjavik meeting with Reagan
in 1986 and the Malta shipboard summit with Bush four weeks ago
is instructive. At Reykjavik, where Gorbachev was eager to
outshine Reagan, he postured and blitzed the U.S. with a series
of far-reaching proposals -- and very nearly got his way on some
key and controversial points. In Malta, where Gorbachev knew
that Bush was on guard against boffo initiatives and in mortal
terror of being upstaged, he played it cool. By letting Bush
dominate the substantive agenda, Gorbachev solidified the
American President's personal support for perestroika.

    At home Gorbachev has managed to lead both the regime and
the opposition: an authoritarian in the pursuit of democracy.
Like Roosevelt, Gorbachev had to be mugged by reality before
drastically challenging the status quo. Just as F.D.R. quickly
abandoned the balanced-budget nostrums of his campaign,
Gorbachev soon concluded that merely tinkering with the system
would not suffice. He purged old-timers and old thinkers from
the Politburo and Central Committee, had himself elected
President, and proceeded to call into question many of the
bedrock assumptions of Soviet political life. In one of his most
memorable phrases, he told those who viewed his changes as
"virtually the end of the universe" that they were actually just
"the end of a deformed universe." As for a new order, Gorbachev
has said, "We're moving from one . . . system of state and
social institutions to another . . . We have to change
everything."

    Also like F.D.R., who used radio to bypass Congress and
reach Americans in their homes, Gorbachev is the first Soviet
leader to use television as a political weapon. With cameras
rolling, he travels the country like an ebullient ward boss,
pressing the flesh, listening to complaints, exhorting his
constituents to ask not what perestroika can do for them but
what they can do for perestroika.

    Most important, Gorbachev has staked out the political
center, a difficult role for a self-avowed radical with a
penchant for controlled chaos. It is, as Soviets say, no
accident that Gorbachev permits Boris Yeltsin -- the purged
Politburo member turned populist -- to attack him from the left,
while hard-liner Yegor Ligachev snipes at him from the right.
Still, Gorbachev is careful not to get too far ahead of his
comrades. As the Soviet editor Vitali Tretyakov has written,
Gorbachev has a "subtle perception of the balance of economic
and political variables not only today but (an appreciation of
where) this balance will be . . . tomorrow and what must be done
to forestall a rolling back (caused) by too abrupt an advance."
Thus, at recent party and government meetings, Gorbachev
placated conservatives by fending off a challenge to the party's
"leading role," at the same time soothing radicals by indicating
that communist primacy is necessary only during "the present
complex stage."

    "The dance between left and right is astounding," says the
Harriman Institute's Robert Legvold. "Gorbachev postpones many
decisions, but when there are hard choices to be made, he opts
squarely for change. As centrists often do, he is losing
popularity, but across the ideological spectrum, he is deemed
indispensable."

    He certainly sees himself to be so. He has threatened to
resign at least three times during the past five years, with
little worry that his offer would be accepted. "Gorbachev is a
superb actor," says the Carnegie Endowment's Dimitri Simes. "He
rants to effect but is always in control. Like Reagan, he has
a real sense of mission, but he is also a master of strategy and
tactics, like Richard Nixon. And if you recall that Abraham
Lincoln held off before freeing the slaves, and then consider
how Gorbachev is astutely waiting for the time to be ripe before
downgrading the party's role, you see how remarkable he is."

    As Secretary of State James Baker has said, "No cliche does
Gorbachev justice. To say he is a piece of work is an
understatement." Adds Republican Senator Alan Simpson of
Wyoming: "I once told Gorbachev that he was a no-bullshit kind
of guy, and he replied that he knew how to say that word in 14
different languages. I don't pretend to know what forces might
combine to cause his removal, but I do know that if he were
operating in the U.S., no American politician in his right mind
would dare run against him."

    As an international figure, Gorbachev is a world-class
leader -- with no one else in his class. But unless he can fix
the Soviet economy, he might well have trouble winning a free
election. If his own people's standard of living continues to
deteriorate, Gorbachev may face the disagreeable choice of
reverting to genuinely dictatorial methods or retiring in
failure and defeat. He will consider himself worthy of the
praise and admiration he has inspired abroad only if and when
he can prove that his political genius is up to the task of
dealing with the economic problems he faces at home.