Gorbachev's Final Hours -- How Will History Judge His Era?

MOSCOW - How will history judge Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev?

Of all the remarkable leaders to emerge in the 20th century - Lenin, Hitler, Roosevelt, Churchill, Mao - the last general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party and the last president of the Soviet Union has been the most enigmatic. He was the Communist who dismantled communism, the reformer who was overtaken by his own reforms, the emperor who oversaw the breakup of his empire.

In the eyes of some, he was the deliverer of freedom. For others, he was the defender of the old, repressive order.

Surviving the coup attempt last August, Gorbachev nonetheless was left presiding over a kingdom of air - ignored by the leaders of the Soviet republics as they formed a new Commonwealth of Independent States; disliked by his own people and blamed by many for the economic chaos sweeping the country; prodded to leave office by nearly all his former colleagues; and seemingly powerless to alter this last, sad chapter of the Soviet saga.

Future generations are likely to associate Gorbachev with something that was the very opposite of his original intention: the destruction of Soviet communism and the fatal weakening of the world's second superpower, both as a military force and as an economy.

But the peasant boy from southern Russia who rose through the Communist bureaucracy to become master of the Kremlin also will be remembered as the man who helped end the Cold War and who returned

free speech to a great nation. Except for the odd historical interval, the Soviet Union has always been a land of censors and secret policemen making conformists out of all but the boldest. Gorbachev made it possible for everyone to speak his mind, opening the floodgates to a torrent of complaints and wildly conflicting opinions that eventually swept him aside.

"Many different emotions boil up inside me when I think of Gorbachev," said Anatoly Medvedev, a centrist Russian legislator whose political career would not have been possible without the reforms introduced by Gorbachev. "He started the process of liberating us from totalitarian rule and created the conditions for the end of communism. But, through his vacillation and indecision, he also undermined our common statehood."

Yuri Shchekochikin, a leading Soviet commentator and one of the last journalists to interview the Soviet president, said: "Gorbachev is a mystery. It is not clear whether he is a reformer or a destroyer, a worthy holder of the Nobel Peace Prize or the man who disrupted a country that covers one-sixth of the Earth's surface. He tried to reconcile the irreconcilable: Communism and democracy. He gave the slaves freedom, and they ended up cursing him."

Perhaps the best explanation for the Gorbachev enigma lies in his unique historical mission. He was the agent chosen by history for the subversion of the totalitarian order established by Lenin and Stalin. In order to destroy this monster, Gorbachev had to proceed by stealth. A master of Kremlin intrigue, he bobbed and weaved between rival factions, hiding his true intentions in a fog of Communist rhetoric. Sometimes, it seemed, he was unable to admit even to himself the revolutionary consequences of his actions.

"I knew the system from the inside. After all, I had spent 10 years as a regional party secretary," Gorbachev told Shchekochikin in a revealing interview in Literaturnaya Gazeta. "I knew the strength (of the party and KGB security police). And what I am able to say now, I was unable to say before. I had to outmaneuver them."

Alexander Yakovlev, a prominent constitutional lawyer, said: "Gorbachev had no choice but to be duplicitous. If he had revealed his hand, the hard-liners would have acted much more decisively. They would not have behaved as they did in the coup last August, when they thought that they might be able to persuade him to come over to their side. His duplicity saved us from enormous bloodshed."

Gorbachev's talent for compromise and prevarication was both his strength and his weakness. His tactical maneuvers probably saved the country from a return to hard-line Communist rule on several occasions. But by refusing to make a decisive break with the past, he lost his chance to introduce meaningful economic reforms. He bought time politically but squandered it economically. While the president was playing his games with the party apparatus, both the economy and the state were rapidly disintegrating. It finally cost him not only his job, but also the superpower he had sworn to reconstruct.

A PRODUCT OF TERROR

In order to understand Mikhail Gorbachev, it is necessary to understand the age that produced him. He is the child of a generation that experienced terror, hunger and war - along with a primitive Communist idealism. He was born in 1931, in the rich agricultural region of Stavropol near the Caucasus mountains, when Stalin's murderous campaign against the independent peasantry was at its height. Millions of peasants were killed or deported to Siberia. The rest were herded onto collective farms.

For many years, Gorbachev never talked about these times or the fate of his own family. Only recently did he reveal that one of his grandfathers was arrested in Stalin's great purge of Communist officials in 1937, while another grandfather was sent to Siberia for failing to fulfill the spring crop-sowing plan. During the terrible famine of 1933, three of Gorbachev's uncles and aunts died of hunger.

In his interview with Literaturnaya Gazeta, Gorbachev traced his decision to launch his perestroika reform movement to this terrible period.

"All this is in me," he said. "If I hadn't come to the inner conviction that everything had to change, I would have acted like the leaders before me acted. Like Brezhnev. I could have lived like an emperor for 10 years and not given a damn about what happened after me. . . . Is there another case in history when a man, having acquired so much power, has given it up?"

But mixed in with the horror at what Gorbachev later described as the "boundless cruelty and sinister disrespect for human life" was a belief in a shining, socialist future. For millions of people, Gorbachev included, the Communist Party became a means of personal advancement. They knew the system had terrible flaws, but they were also impressed by the scale of post-war reconstruction. After Stalin died in 1953, his successor, Nikita Khrushchev, encouraged them to dream of a socialism with a human face.

Gorbachev has identified himself with the generation that came of age during the Khrushchev "thaw," the so-called shestidesyatniki, or men of the '60s. It was a generation that was both supportive and critical of the system, perhaps the last generation of Communist believers before the onset of general cynicism under Leonid Brezhnev.

"The shestidesyatniki . . . wanted a free democratic society in which they could realize their own potential," said Len Karpinsky, a political commentator who worked with Gorbachev in the Communist youth league. "Many became disillusioned after 1968, but Gorbachev remained true to his convictions."

It is difficult to tell whether Gorbachev's repeated assertions of his faith in socialism were a matter of ideological conviction, political opportunism or sheer emotional stubbornness. At a meeting with intellectuals a year ago, he said that betraying socialism would be like betraying his father and grandfather. "I am not ashamed to say that I am a Communist and am devoted to the socialist idea," he told the intellectuals. "My choice was made a long time ago, and it is a final one."

PARTY LOYALTY: A FATAL FLAW

In the end, Gorbachev's fatal flaw proved to be his loyalty to a party that had discredited itself in the eyes of most Soviets. It meant that he was unable to forge a bond with the people and acquire the popular legitimacy he needed to make a decisive break with the past. His rationale for remaining party leader was clear: He feared that the most powerful and organized political force in the country could slip out of his control. But, in trying to control the party bureaucracy, he also became its hostage.

Like many reformers, Gorbachev faced the problem of how to break the power of the boyars, or conservative elite. Through his policy of glasnost, or openness, he sought to give the hitherto quiescent population a political voice in order to counteract the influence of the modern-day boyars, the Communist Party members. But he was still playing court politics. In contrast to Russian President Boris Yeltsin, he was never willing to turn his back completely on the boyars and rely on the people. He always feared that he might be thrown out of office.

"It was hard to break through the cement of the totalitarian system," said Georgi Shakhnazarov, Gorbachev's longtime political adviser. "This explains his hestitations, his occasional lack of confidence, the fact that he sometimes lagged behind events. Every step of the way, he had to think how to stay in office in order to be able to continue carrying through reforms."

A decisive moment came in 1989 when Gorbachev rejected the idea of a direct presidential election and allowed himself to be nominated to a bloc of uncontested seats especially reserved for the Communist Party in the semi-free Soviet legislature. Up to that point, he could probably have won a popular mandate: The economy had not yet started to unravel and his prestige as the father of perestroika and glasnost was still high. But he chose to show solidarity with his colleagues in the Communist Party Politburo.

After Russia and the other republics held freely contested elections last year, the Soviet president began to be identified in the public mind with resistance to reform. The struggle for democracy in the Soviet Union became a struggle of the republics against the center, as personified by Gorbachev. The triumph of democracy inevitably meant the collapse of the centralized Soviet state and the emergence of 15 independent republics.

AN ECONOMY IN RUINS

In 1985, Gorbachev stepped in to fix a moribund economy. But the more he tinkered with the system, the more it became clear that tinkering alone would not be enough. Reform communism turned out to be a contradiction in terms, like fried snowballs. The Communist system devised by Lenin and Stalin was a tightly interlocking political and economic structure, based on state ownership of all the means of production, a monolithic ideology, and a vast machinery for the repression of dissidents. As soon as anyone began fiddling with one part of the system, the other parts were also undermined. By attempting to reform communism, Gorbachev ultimately hastened its complete demise.

The final Soviet leader also hastened the end of communism through his profligate financial policies - and his inability to take painful economic decisions such as freeing prices or closing money-losing factories. The deficit in the state budget rose from more than 3 percent when he took office to a staggering 30 percent to 50 percent by the time he stepped down. The disastrous anti-alcohol campaign of 1986-87 contributed to the deficit by drying up the single most productive source of government revenue. In order to plug the deficit, government printing presses worked overtime, churning out increasingly worthless paper rubles.

The Soviet Union was able to live off its fabulous economic wealth for seven decades. The abundant reserves of oil, gold and other natural resources effectively maintained the world's largest standing army and an empire upon which the sun never set.

Hard-currency oil revenues of $200 billion between 1970 and 1985 helped finance the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, a network of sympathetic regimes from Nicaragua to Angola, and a succession of grandiose economic projects at home.

By the time Gorbachev came to power, it was clear to everyone that the oil money was running out. The traditional Soviet approach to economic development - which amounted to the rape of the natural environment - would have to be abandoned in favor of intensive development. This was what perestroika was ultimately about. But although the new leadership succeeded in reducing the burden of empire by pulling out of Afghanistan and Eastern Europe, it continued to plunder the national treasure chest.

During the Gorbachev years, the Soviet Union's foreign debt virtually quadrupled to $67 billion. Gold reserves plummeted by around 90 percent to 240 tons. Starved of investment, oil production began falling sharply in 1988, depriving the Kremlin of its most reliable source of Western currency. Half the airports in the country have been forced to close down because of lack of fuel. The Soviet bank that has a monopoly on foreign trade is, in effect, bankrupt.

It is both symbolic and significant that Gorbachev should be pushed to leave office at this particular moment. As long as Western banks were prepared to continue lending the Soviet Union money, and the gold reserves had not been completely run down, serious economic reforms could be postponed.

When the entire country went bankrupt, the master politician was left with no further room to maneuver.

GORBACHEV'S PLACE

So how should history judge Mikhail Gorbachev - as visionary statesman or short-sighted politician?

There was a historical inevitability about the fall of communism and the collapse of the Soviet empire: Neither could have lasted forever. But the fact remains that the end did not have to come as it did or when it did. Gorbachev was probably correct when he argued that the totalitarian system could have remained in place for a few more years. It was he who set events in motion and helped shape the way they unfolded.

Unlike many revolutionaries, Gorbachev sought not to change the course of history, but to swim in its tide. Perhaps this was his greatest virtue. He recognized that Eastern Europe would one day free itself of Soviet domination, that East and West Germany would be united, and that the one-party state was doomed. Any attempt to reverse these natural historical processes could have led to enormous human suffering.

"I would set up a golden monument to Gorbachev for not resisting the course of history," said Gleb Yakunin, a dissident priest who was one of hundreds of political prisoners released by the Soviet leader.

"Throughout world history, big empires have never disintegrated peacefully, by themselves. It's largely thanks to Gorbachev that we have been able to dismantle the Leninist-Stalinist system without too much bloodshed."

Gorbachev cites the peaceful dismantling of the totalitarian state as his main historical legacy. He points to the defeat of the August coup as proof that democracy is finally taking root.

But events in the former Soviet Union have not yet run their course. The present economic chaos makes virtually any outcome possible, including the violent restoration of some kind of authoritarian or fascist regime.

"I have tried my best," the final president of the Soviet Union said. "If the end result is a happy one, then the attacks against me will have no meaning. But if things do not work out, then even 12 angels swearing that I was right will change nothing." -------------------------------

GORBACHEV: CHANGING THE WORLD Here are major events that marked the era of Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev.

MARCH 11, 1985: Gorbachev becomes general secretary. NOV. 18, 1985: Gorbachev meets Reagan for first of five times. JAN. 15, 1986: Gorbachev proposes ban on nuclear weapons by 2000. FEB. 25, 1986: Gorbachev outlines perestroika policy and "peaceful co-existence" with U.S. DEC. 16, 1986: Gorbachev lifts exile of Andrei Sakharov. FEB. 28, 1987: Gorbachev drops SDI restriction linkage to INF Treaty. DEC. 10, 1987: Signs INF treaty with Pres. Reagan. APRIL 7, 1988: Soviets agree to Afghanistan troop withdrawal. JULY 1988: Vietnam pledges to pull out of Cambodia by 1990. DEC. 6, 1988: At U.N. Gorbachev announces major troop cuts. JAN. 18, 1989: Gorbachev pledges 14% cut in Soviet defense budget. APRIL 2, 1989: Gorbachev in Cuba rejects idea of "exporting revolution." MAY 11, 1989: Gorbachev meets with Sec. of State Baker, announces arms cuts. MAY 15, 1989: Gorbachev visits China, normalizes relations. JUNE 12, 1989: Gorbachev has triumphant first visit to W. Germany, signs economic agreements. OCT. 25, 1989: Gorbachev says USSR has no moral right to interfere in affairs of East Europe neighbors. NOV. 10, 1989: Berlin Wall opens. DEC 1-4, 1989: President Bush, Gorbachev meet at Malta summit. SEP. 9, 1990: Gorbachev, USSR join international coalition against Iraq. OCT. 15, 1990: Gorbachev wins Nobel Peace Prize. NOV. 19, 1990: Gorbachev, wester leaders agree to reduce forces in Europe. JULY 31, 1991: Gorbachev, Bush sign START treaty at Moscow summit. AUGUST 18, 1991: Coup fails to oust Gorbachev; leads to fall of Communist Party, breakup of country. DEC. 12-13, 1991: Eight republics sign Yeltsin's commonwealth plan.

SOURCE: FACTS ON FILE RESEARCH: CHUCK MYERS, KNIGHT-RIDDER