Mikhail Gorbachev, Author

Most first-time writers with fledgling publishers have a hard time getting noticed. Not this one. Last week, when the small, independent New York publishing house of Richardson & Steirman brought out A Time for Peace by Mikhail Gorbachev, the event was celebrated with a well-stocked press reception at the Soviet embassy in Washington.

The 312-page tome is primarily a collection of speeches, letters and interviews granted since Gorbachev assumed Soviet leadership last March. New material includes a brief introduction by the author, a reverent biography supplied by the Kremlin and eight pages of color photographs. The most unusual are informal shots of the Gorbachev family taken during a vacation, an almost revolutionary development, considering that Westerners had to wait until Soviet Leader Yuri Andropov's funeral to be sure that he even had a wife.

Gorbachev's introduction typifies the man. It is both direct ("We have major achievements as well as quite a few unresolved problems") and rather bombastic ("Sometimes even a single day may be equivalent to a whole epoch in terms of the scope of decisions that have to be made"). The Soviet leader attempts to woo Americans with assurances of his reasonableness: "We are committed firmly to returning Soviet-American relations back onto a normal track, back to the road of mutual understanding and cooperation."

Gorbachev apparently fiddled with the book until the last minute, adding an assurance that the Soviet Union would never start a war. But in the reprinted speeches, the General Secretary often lapses into eye-glazing Marxist cliches: "The time we live in will go down in history as a time of intense class struggle in the world arena," Gorbachev stated on Lenin's birthday in 1983. "Imperialist reaction can hide behind many masks, but it cannot hide the fact that its foreign course is dictated, even today, by narrowly selfish class interests."

The book's publishers, Stewart Richardson, a former editor in chief of Doubleday Publishing, and Hy Steirman, the former owner of what was once the Paperback Library, incorporated in January. Richardson, who had previously obtained a book on foreign policy by Leonid Brezhnev, originally suggested similar works from Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko, both of whom died before they could complete their oeuvres. Negotiations for the Gorbachev book were completed in Moscow in September and were conducted without the knowledge of American authorities. The book was translated from Russian in Moscow, but will not be published there. The first printing of 25,000 copies of the $15.95 book was sold out in a day, and another 25,000 have been ordered, although A Time for Peace is not likely to displace Elvis and Me from the top of the U.S. best-seller lists. Gorbachev, who will receive the standard 15% royalty fee, is giving his income from the book to Soviet Life, an English-language magazine that Moscow publishes in the U.S.