A World Inspects the New Guard

By Roger Rosenblatt

Familiarity is said to breed either contempt or children, but it is not supposed to enhance a mystery. The West has grown familiar with Soviet transferals of power in the past 28 months: Brezhnev became Andropov became Chernenko. Last week the new Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, strode under Western eyes in the now easily recognizable setting of a Moscow funeral for a head of state: Soviet citizens lined up and bundled up in what seems an eternal freeze; Chopin thudding in the background; gray-coated soldiers marching stiff legged like a row of A's; a body laid out like a doll atop a hill of red and white flowers. Familiar sites: the House of Unions, the Historical Museum, the Lenin Mausoleum. Familiar rituals: foreign dignitaries solemnly shaking hands with the new man, giving him the once-over. There is the former leader's widow, the first chance for a closer look at her. What codes can be deciphered in the eulogy? Which Politburo member is standing where? These funerals have been our way inside of late, our odd little knotholes to the land of deep secrets.

So we ought to feel as if we knew considerably more about the Soviet Union after these 28 months. Certainly, we try hard enough to know. Before Konstantin Chernenko's death, Gorbachev was already being tracked like a meteor: Margaret Thatcher likes what she saw of him; he has a lovely wife and a grandchild; did you hear the delightful joke he made about Marx and the British Museum? Yes, but one has to watch the silver; just because he is educated and urbane does not mean he is soft. Clearly, he is out to kill Star Wars. And he does have a temper. And so on. Only after long bouts of fruitless peering does one realize, again, that to scrutinize a Soviet leader is to scrutinize the Soviet state, and the state is a monument to impermeability.

It may be useful on such occasions to pick up John Reed's enthusiastic description of Lenin in Ten Days That Shook the World: "Loved and revered as perhaps few leaders in history have been . . . a leader purely by virtue of intellect; colorless, humorless, uncompromising and detached, without picturesque idiosyncrasies--but with the power of explaining profound ideas in simple terms." Then, having read that, to pick up Vladimir Nabokov's autobiography, Speak, Memory, in which the author, having fled the Soviet revolution, discusses the "bestial terror that had been sanctioned by Lenin --the torture- house, the blood-bespattered wall." Reed saw what he wished to see, Nabokov what he saw. One assumes that Gorbachev is no Lenin, except perhaps in intellectual bent, but the problem of perception remains. Today one takes a position between Reed and Nabokov, between the desire for optimism and the knowledge of a brutal regime.

The desire is to hope for the best; the necessity is to expect the worst. Yet, since the Soviet Union remains a closed gate, both forms of anticipation reveal more of ourselves than of the Soviets. For nearly half a century, the West has been a people of gate watchers in regard to the Soviet Union. Once more we address our questions to the gatekeeper: Does his relative youth signal flexibility or merely a longer reign of adamancy? Does his background in agriculture suggest less emphasis on the military? Is this changing of the guard merely plus ca change? No one on the other side answers, of course, so the questions bounce back to us who pose them, rattling around in their own echoes while we stand outside like the relatives of political prisoners, waiting for news.

Throughout this ritual, the gate remains closed, as it has always been closed, from the days before the Czars through a history that owes little to the West. As for the new gatekeeper, he will reveal himself when he and the state from which he is inseparable are ready. In Speak, Memory, Nabokov tells of awakening mornings in the Russia of his boyhood and glancing at the chink between the white shutters to see what the new day proffered: gloom or "dewy ( brilliancy." The West has no shutters it can open, and the glimpses it gets show almost nothing. This is the way we have learned to live with our adversary, looking eagerly and skeptically into the dark.