The Gorbachev Era

By Strobe Talbott/Moscow

We knew he was going to be different. We did not know he was going to be that different. Last week he marked only his 28th month on the job, yet already his name is being used to describe a new era. That may be premature, but it conveys the sense among citizens and observers of the Soviet Union that Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, 56, is more than just the supreme leader of a vast, heavily armed country: he also represents the potential for dramatic change.

At first Gorbachev seemed new and interesting because of his vigor. That alone distinguished him from his doddering predecessors, whose artificial life-support systems and terminal "colds" were gruesome metaphors for the decrepitude of the system. At last the Soviet Union had a leader who was younger than the state itself.

In Washington, analysts and policymakers alike have yet to figure out what to make of Gorbachev or how to deal with him. Americans had long since grown used to a Soviet adversary who seemed most comfortable sitting on a block of ice, scowling and saying nyet in response to U.S. initiatives. Now the ice is melting. The Kremlin has been making diplomatic and arms-control proposals faster than the White House can reject them. Having met twice with Ronald Reagan, Gorbachev has, for the moment at least, managed to seize control of the timing and agenda for a possible third encounter later this year.

Gorbachev needs a respite from all-out competition with the West in order to get on with his program. He wants to transform the Soviet Union from a muscle- bound but backward empire into a modern state able to hold its own in the global marketplace of goods and ideas. The U.S.S.R., says Gorbachev, must become a "real superpower." Implicit in that phrase is a stunning confession: take away its 3.7 million men under arms and its 25,000-odd nuclear weapons and the Soviet Union would be a Third World country. There is a note of alarm, even shame, and a growing tone of impatience in the way he talks about the society and economy over which he presides. A new specter haunts the land of Karl Marx and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, the specter of apostasy imposed from above. What Gorbachev calls a "revolution" is to be accomplished by the beginning of the 21st century, and he seems to have every intention of being around, and in power, to pronounce it a success.

There is reason to wish him well, but also reason for skepticism. More often than not, the legacy of Russian and Soviet reformers has been reaction. Thaws have turned to chills. So far, much of the Gorbachev phenomenon is words. Andrei Gromyko, the longtime Foreign Minister who two years ago became the country's largely ceremonial President, used to say there is a big difference between words and deeds. Yet in a country where one can be sent to the Gulag for saying the wrong thing, words are deeds. In a closed, hidebound dictatorship, Gorbachev's slogans of openness, restructuring and democratization are either particularly cynical or particularly significant. It is not yet clear which.

By nature as well as by habit, the Soviet system has always run on fear and force. Gorbachev is now telling both rulers and ruled that it runs badly. But to make the system run well, is Gorbachev willing to lead his comrades toward a future in which command and intimidation are replaced by consent and competition? If he tries, will they follow? If they do, will the resulting society still be the Soviet Union? To judge from the resistance that Gorbachev talks about openly, quite a few of his fellow citizens are worried not so much about ideological purity as about their own personal and bureaucratic interests.

In foreign policy, Gorbachev is seeking a relaxation of tensions so that he can devote energy and resources to his domestic reforms. That is why he has been so determined to engage the most anti-Soviet of American Presidents in personal diplomacy. Gorbachev needs to convince international public opinion that he is one of history's good guys. So far, he has proved himself a master of low-risk, high-payoff gestures, doing things that in other societies would be considered only normal and civilized. He let Andrei Sakharov return to Moscow from exile, for instance, and thus earned the cautious, qualified support of many dissident intellectuals, including Sakharov himself. Gorbachev has been talking about the dangers of the nuclear and geopolitical competition in a way that is intriguingly -- or, skeptics would say, suspiciously -- similar to the way liberal Western strategists have talked for years. Sometimes he seems almost to be proposing an end to the cold war.

As public relations, this "new thinking" has been immensely successful. Gorbachev has outcommunicated the Great Communicator. Some recent European opinion polls have found that the man in the Kremlin is more popular than the one in the White House. But the substance of Gorbachev's rhetoric remains to be tested, and it could prove inflammatory close to home. Gorbachev's popularity in Eastern Europe seems already to be backfiring against the regimes in the region -- and therefore against Soviet control. One of the most extraordinary images of the year came last month at the Berlin Wall. A group of East German youths had gathered in hopes of hearing a rock concert on the other side when armed police moved in. The youths took up a chant: "We want Gorbachev!" In effect, they were invoking his new thinking to mitigate the brutality of the old order. The tactic did not work. The police cracked heads and dispersed the crowd. The moment did not augur well, either, for the more free-spirited citizens of the Soviet bloc or for Gorbachev himself. It demonstrated that, too often, Soviet power still comes from the barrel of a gun or the business end of a truncheon.

Marxists have long relished pointing out the "contradictions" in other political systems. Now Gorbachev is forcing them to face up to some excruciating contradictions in their own. Whether, and how, he can resolve them is one of the most important questions of the decade, perhaps even of the era.