Gorbachev Touch

By Michael Kramer

When Franklin Roosevelt set out to rescue capitalism from the Depression, he had little use for rigidly defined objectives. Improvisation corrected by feedback, that was Roosevelt's way. "The country needs bold, persistent experimentation," he declared. "Take a method and try it; if it fails, admit it and try another. But above all try something."

As Mikhail Gorbachev seeks to save Soviet communism by transforming it, his political style resembles Roosevelt's. His skills had better be at least as formidable as F.D.R.'s because the challenge he faces is even more daunting. The Depression was one rough patch in American history; for the Soviet Union, history itself has been 72 years of bad road.

Whatever happens to Gorbachev and his risky experiment, he already qualifies as a political genius, if only because he radiates a sense of purpose, motion, decisiveness and hope -- in short, "the vision thing." While Western experts bicker over whether he knows what he is doing and where he is going, Gorbachev gives the impression that he has as many answers as they have questions. Part of his acumen is his sure feel for what is truly important to his task and, conversely, a breathtaking audacity in discarding what he believes is less than vital. This year, without a great deal of visible hand wringing, he decided that Soviet domination of Eastern Europe was a drag on his campaign to restructure the Soviet Union. Hence his emergence as the Commissar Liberator.

Alexander Yakovlev, one of Gorbachev's closest Kremlin aides, worked on a dissertation about F.D.R. while an exchange student at Columbia University in 1958. "What struck Yakovlev most about Roosevelt," says Loren Graham, a Sovietologist who was a classmate at Columbia, "was how Roosevelt understood that to save the system he had to give up much that wasn't central in order to preserve the essence." The lifting of the Iron Curtain shows that Yakovlev wasn't the only one who understood that point.

Gorbachev also appears to have learned, or sensed instinctively, what Plato and Maimonides knew: the greatest statesmen are therapists. A ruler becomes a leader and governs legitimately only when he encourages people to face the truth about themselves and therefore causes them to consent freely to their governance.

The Soviet people long ago became accustomed to leaders who lied to them. By talking straight, Gorbachev has shocked his subjects into a new kind of political engagement and civic self-respect. What is more, he has given content to his rhetoric. As a Bush adviser cracks, "I would be hard pressed to see how a CIA mole planted in Moscow would be acting differently if he were charged with dismantling the Soviet empire and transforming the nature of aggressive communism."

An American agent? Hardly. An American-style politician? Definitely -- the kind the U.S. increasingly lacks. Snowing the West has been easy for Gorbachev. Like Woody Allen's chameleon character Zelig, Gorbachev has adopted many of the West's favorite buzz words: stability, reasonable sufficiency, mutual security, the unwinnability of nuclear war, interdependence, human values, a civil society, the fate of the earth, the endangered planet. He has also shown that he knows what these words mean and that he means them himself when he uses them.

But Gorbachev has done more than just master the lexicon of Western liberalism. From the beginning he knew that the real trick was to co-opt Western conservatives. In 1984 Ronald Reagan was still in his evil-empire phase, so Gorbachev targeted the free world's second toughest anti-Soviet, Margaret Thatcher, who was quickly charmed. Gorbachev, said Thatcher, was a man with whom the West could "do business."

He has even tried to enlist God on his side. If a single phrase captures the fear and hatred of the regime Gorbachev represents, it is "Godless communism." So the top man in the Kremlin has invoked God almost as brazenly as Bush wraps himself in the American flag. In his first interview with the Western press, he told TIME in 1985 that "God on high has not refused to give us enough wisdom to find ways to bring us an improvement in our relations." Since then he has embraced Christian values of humanity, received Vatican representatives at the Kremlin, and declared freedom of religion to be "indispensable" for renewing the Soviet Union. Then, in early December, he became a respectful if not quite penitent pilgrim. In a year that had seen him reach out and touch foreign leaders from Cuba's Castro to China's Deng Xiaoping, Gorbachev addressed the Pope as "Your Holiness," and the Pope responded by blessing perestroika.

The essence of politics is timing, and Gorbachev's sense of when to push and when to retreat is exquisite. The difference between his performances at the Reykjavik meeting with Reagan in 1986 and the Malta shipboard summit with Bush four weeks ago is instructive. At Reykjavik, where Gorbachev was eager to outshine Reagan, he postured and blitzed the U.S. with a series of far- reaching proposals -- and very nearly got his way on some key and controversial points. In Malta, where Gorbachev knew that Bush was on guard against boffo initiatives and in mortal terror of being upstaged, he played it cool. By letting Bush dominate the substantive agenda, Gorbachev solidified the American President's personal support for perestroika.

At home Gorbachev has managed to lead both the regime and the opposition: an authoritarian in the pursuit of democracy. Like Roosevelt, Gorbachev had to be mugged by reality before drastically challenging the status quo. Just as F.D.R. quickly abandoned the balanced-budget nostrums of his campaign, Gorbachev soon concluded that merely tinkering with the system would not suffice. He purged old-timers and old thinkers from the Politburo and Central Committee, had himself elected President, and proceeded to call into question * many of the bedrock assumptions of Soviet political life. In one of his most memorable phrases, he told those who viewed his changes as "virtually the end of the universe" that they were actually just "the end of a deformed universe." As for a new order, Gorbachev has said, "We're moving from one . . . system of state and social institutions to another . . . We have to change everything."

Also like F.D.R., who used radio to bypass Congress and reach Americans in their homes, Gorbachev is the first Soviet leader to use television as a political weapon. With cameras rolling, he travels the country like an ebullient ward boss, pressing the flesh, listening to complaints, exhorting his constituents to ask not what perestroika can do for them but what they can do for perestroika.

Most important, Gorbachev has staked out the political center, a difficult role for a self-avowed radical with a penchant for controlled chaos. It is, as Soviets say, no accident that Gorbachev permits Boris Yeltsin -- the purged Politburo member turned populist -- to attack him from the left, while hard- liner Yegor Ligachev snipes at him from the right. Still, Gorbachev is careful not to get too far ahead of his comrades. As the Soviet editor Vitali Tretyakov has written, Gorbachev has a "subtle perception of the balance of economic and political variables not only today but ((an appreciation of where)) this balance will be . . . tomorrow and what must be done to forestall a rolling back ((caused)) by too abrupt an advance." Thus, at recent party and government meetings, Gorbachev placated conservatives by fending off a challenge to the party's "leading role," at the same time soothing radicals by indicating that communist primacy is necessary only during "the present complex stage."

"The dance between left and right is astounding," says the Harriman Institute's Robert Legvold. "Gorbachev postpones many decisions, but when there are hard choices to be made, he opts squarely for change. As centrists often do, he is losing popularity, but across the ideological spectrum, he is deemed indispensable."

He certainly sees himself to be so. He has threatened to resign at least three times during the past five years, with little worry that his offer would be accepted. "Gorbachev is a superb actor," says the Carnegie Endowment's Dimitri Simes. "He rants to effect but is always in control. Like Reagan, he has a real sense of mission, but he is also a master of strategy and tactics, like Richard Nixon. And if you recall that Abraham Lincoln held off before freeing the slaves, and then consider how Gorbachev is astutely waiting for the time to be ripe before downgrading the party's role, you see how remarkable he is."

As Secretary of State James Baker has said, "No cliche does Gorbachev justice. To say he is a piece of work is an understatement." Adds Republican Senator Alan Simpson of Wyoming: "I once told Gorbachev that he was a no- bullshit kind of guy, and he replied that he knew how to say that word in 14 different languages. I don't pretend to know what forces might combine to cause his removal, but I do know that if he were operating in the U.S., no American politician in his right mind would dare run against him."

As an international figure, Gorbachev is a world-class leader -- with no one else in his class. But unless he can fix the Soviet economy, he might well have trouble winning a free election. If his own people's standard of living continues to deteriorate, Gorbachev may face the disagreeable choice of reverting to genuinely dictatorial methods or retiring in failure and defeat. He will consider himself worthy of the praise and admiration he has inspired abroad only if and when he can prove that his political genius is up to the task of dealing with the economic problems he faces at home.

With reporting by Ann Blackman/Moscow