TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/051192/0511unk.000

Text File | 1992-09-10 | 6.0 KB | 117 lines

                                                                                BOOK EXCEPRT, Page  47

Reading Between the Lines


In describing his downfall, Gorbachev candidly admits his shock
(and even a few mistakes) but glosses over painful truths

By JOHN KOHAN/MOSCOW


    Mikhail Gorbachev is not the kind of statesman who could
ever quietly fade away into history. The collapse of the
U.S.S.R. may have left the former Soviet President without a job
or a country, but he has continued to speak his mind with the
same confident authority he had in the past, and he travels
abroad now with the honor and respect due a ruling leader.
Gorbachev has done nothing to disabuse admirers of the
impression that his political career is far from over. During
a visit this month to Tokyo, he speculated about a possible
comeback, drawing an analogy to French President Charles de
Gaulle, who resigned in 1946 out of impatience with party
political maneuvering, to return in 1958 at the age of 68. "I
am only 61," quipped Gorbachev. "That means there is a chance."

    Given Gorbachev's hectic "retirement" schedule, it is
amazing that he found the time and tranquillity to write about
his fall from power. But historians should beware of politicians
who publish their memoirs too soon. Gorbachev's fascinating
narrative makes no pretense of offering a scrupulously detailed
or unbiased account of the events last year that transformed the
modern world. There are no revelations here about what went on
behind closed Kremlin doors. These are the passionate jottings
of a man who is willing to acknowledge his mistakes but remains
unreconciled to present-day realities. Gorbachev continues to
believe the old Soviet republics would be better off in a new
union; history, it appears, cheated him of this goal.

    Gorbachev is selective in reviewing the recent past. He
remains silent about one of the most puzzling episodes of his
final year in office: why he abruptly abandoned radical economic
reforms in the fall of 1990 and made common cause with
hard-liners in the military and KGB. Some would argue that this
was the pivotal moment in the decline and fall of the Soviet
Empire. Gorbachev describes this period with remarkable
understatement as "particularly difficult." He will only admit
that he should have "seized the moment" and invited democratic
groups to join him in "some sort of round-table meetings." He
also sheds no light on the January 1991 crackdown in the Baltic
republics, which seriously tarnished his image abroad as a
reformer. He notes in the vaguest terms that there was "an
escalation in confrontation," and that "the threat of
dictatorship was real."

    Some of Gorbachev's assessments betray wishful thinking
about what might have been. He blames the August coup attempt
for making any efforts to overhaul the Communist Party and
introduce a more measured program of market reforms
"impossible." The putsch certainly accelerated the breakup of
the Soviet state, but it is debatable whether Gorbachev would
have achieved either aim had the hard-liners not made their
move. By the summer of 1991, Kremlin power was already ebbing
away to republican leaders like Russia's Boris Yeltsin; the
party was clearly headed for a schism. It is also doubtful, as
Gorbachev suggests, that he might have succeeded in his second
attempt to form a new, looser union in the months after the
putsch if the Russians had not wavered in their support.
Gorbachev gives the impression that the overwhelming vote for
independence in Ukraine might somehow have been reversed, and
was not an insurmountable obstacle to his plan.

    Gorbachev's stormy relations with sometime enemy, sometime
ally Yeltsin are woven through the narrative like a leitmotiv
from the Wagnerian music he so much admires. When Gorbachev
asks the Russian leader why the republican parliament will not
back a new union-treaty draft, Gorbachev thinks that Yeltsin is
too evasive in his answer. He criticizes the Russian President
for "dissembling." But Gorbachev cannot accuse Yeltsin of
keeping him completely in the dark about the plot the Russian
President and leaders from Belarus and Ukraine were hatching to
bring the Soviet Union to an end. Before heading off to the
fateful December summit in a forest dacha near Brest, Yeltsin
pointedly warned Gorbachev of "the possibility that a union of
Slavic republics might come up." The former Soviet leader -- at
his own peril -- dismissed the idea as "unacceptable."

    Gorbachev pledged support for the new Commonwealth of
Independent States in telephone conversations with Western
leaders during his final days in the Kremlin, but his words were
always full of foreboding. In fact, Gorbachev casts himself in
his narrative as a reluctant prophet who fears that his
premonitions of chaos in the old Soviet Union are bound to come
true. But what if Gorbachev is proved right? Does he present a
real alternative? His arguments for what he calls a
"confederative union state" sound increasingly irrelevant, as
the former Soviet republics move further apart with growing
speed in establishing their political and economic independence.
The old union has shattered into so many splinters now that no
one can put it together again -- not even Gorbachev.

    The former President writes with such personal conviction
that he almost persuades the reader he could do the job.
Gorbachev was always too demonstrative and emotional a
politician to be easily packaged in television sound bites or
the conventional memoir form. His wounded pride is never far
below the surface -- for example, when he recounts how Yeltsin
refused to take part in a ceremony turning over the "nuclear
button" and would not let him leave office with some shred of
personal dignity. But this is not the testament of a defeated
man. Whatever his personal setbacks, Gorbachev remains an
optimist. Reflecting on his past ties with the KGB, he writes,
"I knew that what I am able to say today, I couldn't have said
then. I had to beat them at their game." And he did.