Rethinking The Red Menace GORBACHEV IS HELPING THE WEST BY SHOWING THAT THE SOVIET THREAT ISN'T WHAT IT USED TO BE -- AND, WHAT'S MORE, THAT IT NEVER WAS

By Strobe Talbott

George Bush concluded after the shipboard summit in Malta that the time had come for him to join in an enterprise that Mikhail Gorbachev has called "new political thinking." It was a sentiment worthy of a New Year's resolution, and a new decade's. So far, Gorbachev has had a near monopoly on the promulgation of bold ideas. Bush's main contribution has been an appeal for Western policy to move "beyond containment." That phrase, which he hoped would be the slogan of the year, sounded all right when he first enunciated it last spring, but that was a long time ago. Since then Gorbachev's initiatives and the events they have triggered have made containment sound like such an anachronism that the need to move beyond it is self-evident. Last week's U.S. invasion of Panama was a case in point. It was Uncle Sam's first major post- containment military operation; neither the ghost of President James Monroe nor a single live communist was anywhere in sight.

Members of the Administration have had trouble thinking about the long-term future because the short term is so uncertain. No sooner did they decide on affirmative answers to their initial questions about Gorbachev -- Is he for real? Is he good for us? -- than they started worrying, Will he last? Will he succeed? What happens, and who takes his place, if he doesn't?

Such questions are by definition unanswerable except with qualified guesses. What are the chances of rain tomorrow? Forty percent. Better take an umbrella. What are the chances of the Big One sometime in the next 30 years if you live along the San Andreas fault? High enough that you'd better check your insurance policy; make sure it covers acts of God. Gorbachev is to political earthquakes what matadors are to bulls. Wondering about what will happen to him -- or because of him -- is unlikely to inspire boldness in someone so naturally cautious and prone to overinsurance as George Bush. That, in essence, is what happened in 1989.

Whether Gorbachev succeeds or not matters immensely to his people and the world. But the world should not need to await the outcome of what he is trying to do to see the significance of what he has already done: he has accelerated history, making possible the end of one of its most disreputable episodes, the imposition of a cruel and unnatural order on hundreds of millions of people. Sooner or later, their despair and defiance would have reached critical mass. But the explosion occurred this year, much sooner and more spectacularly than anyone had predicted, because the people had in Gorbachev the most powerful ally imaginable.

Perhaps just as important, the Gorbachev phenomenon may have a transforming effect outside the communist world, on the perceptions and therefore the policies of the West. Watching him ought to inspire, in addition to awe, suspense and admiration, an epiphany about what his fellow citizens call, with increasing irony, anger and impatience, "Soviet reality." Gorbachev's determination to restructure that reality should induce Westerners to practice a kind of reverse engineering on the images in their own mind. The question of the hour should be not just, What next? but, Knowing what we know now, having seen what we have seen this year, how should we revise our understanding of the Soviet challenge?

The best way to begin mapping the conceptual terrain that lies beyond containment is to re-examine the premises of containment itself.

For more than four decades, Western policy has been based on a grotesque exaggeration of what the U.S.S.R. could do if it wanted, therefore what it might do, therefore what the West must be prepared to do in response. Gorbachev has shown that, in some respects, where the West thought the Soviet Union was strong, it was in fact weak. The spectacle of this past year -- often exhilarating, sometimes chaotic and in Tiananmen Square horrifying -- has revealed a brittleness in the entire communist system, whether the armed and uniformed minions of the state ended up snipping barbed wire, as they did in Hungary, or slaughtering students, as they did in China. That brittleness has been there all along, but it was often mistaken for toughness. By "calling things by their own names," Gorbachev is admitting that much of what has been perceived by the outside world as his country's collective "discipline" is actually an ossifying, demoralizing, brutalizing system of institutionalized inefficiency. He should make us look again at the U.S.S.R.: a monstrosity, yes, but not a monster in so formidable and predatory a sense as has figured in the cross hairs of Western defense policy.

The Soviets themselves now look back on the almost two decades of Leonid Brezhnev's rule as the era of "stagnation." Harsh as that word sounds, it is actually a euphemism; it really means general decline. Gorbachev personifies to his own people, and should personify to the outside world, a damning revelation about Soviet history: Russia made a huge mistake at the beginning of the 20th century, one that it is trying to correct as it prepares to enter the 21st. Having already missed out on what the 18th and 19th centuries offered in the way of modernity, including much of the Industrial Revolution and the democratic revolution, Russia then missed whatever chance World War I and the collapse of the monarchy gave it to become a modern country in this century. In assembling the Soviet state, the Bolsheviks took two components of their own revolutionary modus operandi -- terror and conspiracy -- grafted them onto the ideology of universal state ownership, then retained five vestiges of the czarist old regime: despotism, bureaucracy, the secret police, a huge army and a multinational empire subjugated by Russians.

The result of that mix is the disaster that Gorbachev faces today. The combination of totalitarianism, or "command-administrative methods," and bureaucracy has stultified Soviet society, economy and culture. Gorbachev is trying to introduce the economic mechanisms and democratic political institutions that have been developing in the West while the Soviet Union has been trudging down its own dead end, particularly during the lost years of the Brezhnev period.

Yet in the West the era of stagnation was seen as one of Soviet ascendancy -- even, in some key and dangerous respects, of Soviet supremacy. Here was a vast, mysterious country on the other side of the globe from the U.S., the Great Geopolitical and Ideological Antipode. It was believed to be possessed of immense and malignant strength, including the self-confidence, prowess and resources for the conduct of all-out war. Even now, with the Pentagon looking for ways to trim its budget, U.S. defense policy includes a caveat: the West must be prepared for the danger that Gorbachev will be overthrown; he might be replaced by a retrograde Soviet leadership that will once again -- that is the key phrase: once again -- threaten the rest of the world with military intimidation if not conquest.

Soldiers are given to cautioning their civilian bosses to judge the enemy by his capabilities, not by his stated intentions. He can deceive about his intentions, or his intentions can change from one year to the next. Capabilities, by contrast, are more constant; they can be gauged objectively; they are harder to change and mask, and once they have truly changed, they are harder to reverse.

And what was this capability that the Soviet Union supposedly had, which the West must, at whatever cost necessary, be prepared to match and thwart? The short answer: the capability to win World War III. And what would World War III be like? Again, the short answer: it would be like the beginning of World War II. The minds and computers of Western defense experts have long concentrated on two dangers, each a variant of a devastating episode that occurred about a half-century ago. One is an armored attack on Western Europe, a replay of Hitler's dash to the English Channel. The other is a nuclear Pearl Harbor, a bolt-from-the-blue attack by Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles that would catch American weapons sleeping in their silos.

These nightmares are the ultimate example of generals preparing to fight the last war. Western strategists arguably must assume the worst about how good the enemy is in his ability to do bad things, how reliable and well-trained his troops are, how swiftly and effectively he could coordinate his attack. But they must also have a plausible answer to the question, Why would the enemy do those bad things?

Scenarios for a Soviet invasion of Western Europe have always had a touch of paranoid fantasy about them. In the late 1940s, when Western Europe was weak and virtually defenseless, the Soviet Union itself was exhausted and overextended. Yes, Joseph Stalin "conquered" Eastern Europe -- Exhibit A in the charge of Soviet expansionism -- but he did so in the final battles of World War II, not as a prelude to World War III. The Red Army had filled the vacuum left by the collapsing Wehrmacht. By the early 1950s, any Kremlin warmonger would have to contend with a Western Europe that was already firmly back on its feet and therefore no pushover, and also with an American doctrine warning that Soviet aggression would trigger nuclear retaliation against the U.S.S.R.

As for an attempted Soviet decapitating attack on American missiles, that danger has always been mired in a paradox. No matter how homicidal or even genocidal the enemy is thought to be, he is not supposed to be suicidal. Deterrence presupposes not only the capacity to retaliate but also sanity and the imperative of self-preservation on both sides. A madman bent on self- destruction is, almost by definition, impossible to deter. It has always required a suspension of disbelief to imagine a sane Soviet leadership, no matter how cold-blooded, calculating that it could, in any meaningful sense, get away with an attack on the U.S. nuclear deterrent. Even if all American land-based missiles were destroyed, the men in the Kremlin would have to count on the distinct possibility that their country, and perhaps their command bunker, would sustain a pulverizing blow from U.S. submarine- and bomber- launched weapons.

Former Secretary of Defense Harold Brown, a world-class thinker about the unthinkable and nobody's softy, acknowledged back in the 1970s that a Soviet decision to attack American missiles would be a "cosmic roll of the dice." Yet Soviets play chess; they do not shoot craps. Stalin advanced several black pawns and a knight against one of white's most vulnerable squares, West Berlin, in 1948. Nikita Khrushchev tried a similar gambit in 1961, and he was downright reckless over Cuba in 1962. The stupidity as well as the failure of that move contributed to his downfall.

Those episodes, scary as they were at the time, should be strangely reassuring in retrospect. They prove that deterrence is something like a force of nature. The very existence of nuclear weapons exercises a gravitational pull on the superpowers during moments of political and military confrontation, tugging them back from the brink. In a real crisis, precise calculations on one side about exactly how many of what kind of weapons the other side has do not matter all that much; what matters is that both have nuclear weapons, period.

This concept of "existential deterrence" (so named by McGeorge Bundy, who was at John F. Kennedy's side during his showdowns with Khrushchev) is rooted in common sense and experience alike. Yet until now it has never been deemed a prudent basis for keeping the peace. Why? Because worst-case assumptions about Soviet intentions have fed, and fed upon, worst-case assumptions about Soviet capabilities.

Even now the nightmare of a Soviet nuclear attack continues to darken the waking hours of Western military and political leaders and the theoreticians who advise them. The Bush Administration remains committed to an expensive, redundant and provocative array of new strategic nuclear weapons -- the MX and Midgetman intercontinental missiles, the B-1 and B-2 (Stealth) bombers and the Trident II submarine-launched missile. These programs are monuments to old thinking. They are throwbacks to the days when the strategists accepted, as an article of their dark faith, the vulnerability of the U.S. to Kremlin crapshooters.

In order to believe the Soviet Union is capable of waging and quite possibly winning a war against the West, one has to accept as gospel a hoary and dubious cliche about the U.S.S.R.: the place is a hopeless mess where nothing works, with the prominent and crucial exception of two institutions -- the armed forces and the KGB. A Kremlin that cannot put food on its people's tables can put an SS-18 warhead on top of a Minuteman silo in North Dakota, some 5,000 miles away. Even though 15% to 20% of the grain harvested on the collective farms rots or falls off the back of trucks before it reaches the cities, a Soviet-led blitzkrieg through West Germany would be a masterpiece of military efficiency.

The big red military machine may still look formidable from 22,000 miles up, the altitude from which American spy satellites snap pictures of armored columns on maneuver. But at ground level, the Soviet army looks more like a lot of bewildered 17-year-olds, many of them far from their backward, non- Russian homelands, bouncing around in the back of clunky trucks on potholed roads leading nowhere useful to their country's devastated economy. Yet they are counted under the ominous rubric of 4.25 million men under arms in the Warsaw Pact. So are over a million troops, most of them draftees, from the East European states. They include some of the same Hungarians who chanted, "Russians Go Home!"; the same Czechoslovaks, many of army age, who thronged into Wenceslas Square and exorcised the Politburo by clinking their key chains; and the same East Germans who found a better way to invade the Federal Republic throughout the year.

In addition to counting heads with helmets on them and inventorying the enemy's hardware, the American arithmetic of fear has always factored in an ideological multiplier. Here was a political system that, seen from the outside, seemed to have a flat belly, a thick neck, big biceps and plenty of intestinal fortitude; it was also thought to have, in communism, a coherent and all too plausible plan for winning the zero-sum game of history.

In the 1970s some respected intellectuals in the U.S. and Europe worked themselves into paroxysms of Spenglerian pessimism about the decline of the West. As recently as 1983, Jean-Francois Revel, the distinguished French journalist and philosopher, wrote a widely read book, How Democracies Perish. It began: "Democracy may, after all, turn out to have been a historical accident, a brief parenthesis that is closing before our eyes . . . It will have lasted a little over two centuries, to judge by the speed of growth of the forces bent on its destruction." Principal among those superior hostile forces was world communism.

Yet an important part of the drama of this past year was the implosion of the very idea of communism. Many card-carrying party intellectuals in Moscow, particularly of the younger generation, admit that perestroika too is a euphemism; it suggests fixing something that is broken, but it really means scrapping something that never worked, even as a blueprint for Soviet society, not to mention for world conquest.

One of Gorbachev's closest advisers, Politburo member Alexander Yakovlev, privately told a foreign leader this fall, "Perestroika means a loss of our self-confidence." Then he added, "It also means realizing that our self- confidence was always misplaced." The West ought to realize that much of its fear of the Soviet Union was also misplaced.

To recognize that the Soviet threat has been greatly exaggerated is not to commit the sin of "moral equivalence"; Western self-criticism about the phobias of the cold war does not imply a neutral judgment about the Soviet system. Quite the contrary: it is precisely because that system is such an abomination against basic human aspirations, against human nature itself, that much of what the West called "Soviet power" was actually Soviet weakness, and the instruments of that power could never have been all they were cracked up to be.

For years there has been dissenting wisdom in the West. Most notably, George Kennan, the intellectual godfather of the original concept of containment, has objected to the way it was applied; he has cautioned against demonizing the adversary, overestimating enemy strength and overmilitarizing the Western response.

As early as 1947, Kennan suggested that Soviet power "bears within it the seeds of its own decay" and that the U.S.S.R. might turn out to be "one of the weakest and most pitiable of national societies." But unlike the little boy in the fable, Kennan was largely ignored by the crowd when he dared to say out loud that perhaps the emperor in the Kremlin was not quite so resplendent in his suit of armor. Now along comes Gorbachev to announce his nakedness to the world, and Yakovlev to confide that he too feels a chill.

Even some of the most hardheaded Western diplomats stationed in Moscow as well as some of the most hard-line experts who have recently visited there are revising their views. They now say they doubt that Gorbachev's Kremlin or any imaginable successor's will undertake foreign adventures while the home front is in a state of such crisis, as it will be for a long, long time to come. A new consensus is emerging, that the Soviet threat is not what it used to be.

The real point, however, is that it never was. The doves in the Great Debate of the past 40 years were right all along.

Yet, ironically, it is the hawks who are most loudly claiming victory, including moderate Republicans who are uncomfortable with that label and would rather be seen as conservatives. Much of American policy now seems based on the conceit that insofar as Gorbachev is good news, he is both a consequence and a vindication of Western foresight, toughness, consistency and solidarity. According to this claim, the heady events of 1989 are the payoff for the $4.3 trillion ($9.3 trillion adjusted for inflation) that it has cost the U.S. to wage peace since 1951.

Some go further, contending that the $2 trillion Reagan defense buildup of the 1980s made possible the opportunities for ending the cold war in the 1990s. In other words, had it not been for the whole panoply of post-detente Western pressure tactics, starting with the imposition in 1974 of the Jackson- Vanik Amendment linking improved U.S.-Soviet trade to increased Jewish emigration from the U.S.S.R., there would be a different man in the Kremlin today. Or at least there would be a very different Gorbachev, one who would still be suppressing dissidents, sending refuseniks to Siberia, invading neighboring countries, propping up dictators, financing wars in the Third World and generally behaving the way central-casting Soviet leaders are supposed to.

If one believes that, then it follows naturally enough that there should be no basic change in the main lines of U.S. policy. It was largely this logic and the smugness that went with it that earlier this year helped the Bush Administration rationalize its initial passivity in response to Gorbachev.

But Gorbachev is responding primarily to internal pressures, not external ones. The Soviet system has gone into meltdown because of inadequacies and defects at its core, not because of anything the outside world has done or not done or threatened to do. Gorbachev has been far more appalled by what he has seen out his limousine window and in reports brought to him by long-faced ministers than by satellite photographs of American missiles aimed at Moscow. He has been discouraged and radicalized by what he has heard from his own constituents during his walkabouts in Krasnodar, Sverdlovsk and Leningrad -- not by the exhortations, remonstrations or sanctions of foreigners.

George Bush and Secretary of State James Baker are realistic enough to see that there is little the U.S. can do to "help" Gorbachev turn his economy around in the near- or even medium-term future. By the same token, there was never all that much the U.S. could do, or did do, to hurt the Soviet economy. The inertia, the wastefulness, the corruption -- these have always been inherent in the Soviet system. Therefore their consequences are self-inflicted wounds rather than the result of Western boycotts or other punitive policies. The imposition more than 15 years ago of the Jackson-Vanik Amendment was politically symbolic but marginal in its impact; the same is likely to be true if and when the amendment is waived next year.

It is a solipsistic delusion to think the West could bring about the seismic % events now seizing the U.S.S.R. and its "fraternal" neighbors. If the Soviet Union had ever been as strong as the threatmongers believed, it would not be undergoing its current upheavals. Those events are actually a repudiation of the hawkish conventional wisdom that has largely prevailed over the past 40 years, and a vindication of the Cassandra-like losers, including Kennan.

If Kennan's view and his recommendations had prevailed, the world would probably at least still be where it is today, beyond containment, and perhaps it might have arrived there considerably sooner and at less expense.

For much of the past year, it was considered bold to ask, What if Gorbachev really is willing to disarm significantly? What if he is prepared to demilitarize Soviet society and Soviet foreign policy? What if he adopts levels and deployments of troops, types and numbers of weapons that give real meaning to his slogans of "mutual security" and "nonoffensive defense"?

The question marks are now out of date and therefore out of place. Gorbachev is already doing the things spelled out in the litany of conditional clauses. This fall the prestigious London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies solemnly concluded that the unilateral cuts that Gorbachev has already announced "will, once complete, virtually eliminate the surprise attack threat which has so long concerned NATO planners." In November the Pentagon said virtually the same thing. That certification is all the more meaningful coming from two organizations that have long believed such a threat existed not only on paper but in the real world.

To its credit, the Bush Administration has gone from asking what-if questions about Gorbachev to what-now questions about the American share of responsibility for transforming the military competition. But it would be easier to come up with a new answer to the perennial question about defense -- How much is enough? -- if there were a clearer realization that the old answer was excessive.

It also is time to think seriously about eventually retiring the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, with honor, to be sure, but without too much nostalgia. Yes, NATO has helped keep the peace. But so has the existence of nuclear weapons, and so has the inherent weakness of the Soviet Union -- the nakedness of the red emperor before his enemies.

There is no danger that NATO will be dismantled precipitately, since virtually all leaders in the West and even some in the East agree that the alliance is necessary to help handle the dislocations, instabilities and potential conflicts that are almost sure to attend the disintegration of communist rule in the East. But NATO is at best a stopgap until something more up-to-date and effective can be devised to take its place. The Western alliance was invented to maintain the standoff between two giant blocs. But the great ideological divide of the Iron Curtain is giving way to messier divisions among nation-states and nationalities within states. NATO is simply not constituted or equipped to deal with trouble between two highly uncomradely Warsaw Pact members, Hungary and Rumania, or between two feuding republics of nonaligned Yugoslavia, Serbia and Slovenia. NATO should be maintained during a period of transition, as long as it is understood to be playing that temporary role. To his credit, and the Administration's, James Baker, in a thoughtful and farsighted speech earlier this month in West Berlin, seemed to be inviting Western statesmen and thinkers to join in the search for new ideas and institutions that will ensure the security of post- cold war Europe.

Nor is it too soon to think about rolling back other U.S. security commitments outside Europe. If the Soviets will finally pack up and pull out of their air and naval bases in Viet Nam, why shouldn't the U.S. vacate its facilities in the Philippines? One objection is that the peoples and governments of Southeast Asia and the Pacific Rim want a permanent, visible American military presence in that region as a counterbalance to China and Japan. That is a bit like suggesting, as many are suddenly doing, that now more than ever the world needs NATO -- and the Warsaw Pact -- to fend off the specter of German reunification and remilitarization. New rationales are being concocted for old arrangements.

Maybe a transformed international order does require American (and Soviet) troops in a divided Germany, or American warships in the South China Sea. But the objectives for those deployments should be honestly and clearly defined; they should be vigorously debated and politically supported on their own terms. If the U.S. obfuscates or misrepresents its purposes, it will be able to sustain neither domestic political support for its overseas missions nor the hospitality and cooperation of its allies.

When the global revolution against communism came to China this year, stimulated in part by Gorbachev's visit in May, the U.S. Government was seized with ambivalence. It welcomed the outburst of democratic spirit, up to a point. At the same time, it feared instability, not just because widespread trouble could cost the lives of hundreds, perhaps thousands of students, but because it would jeopardize a long-standing relationship between the U.S. and the now so obviously misnamed People's Republic. The Administration was so eager to repair relations that it seemed willing to do so on the terms laid down by the decrepit tyrants in the Forbidden City. Bush first sent his National Security Adviser, Brent Scowcroft, and the Deputy Secretary of State, Lawrence Eagleburger, to Beijing secretly in July. Another visit earlier this month was not announced until after the emissaries had arrived at their destination. The whole thing looked sneaky, as though the Administration were trying to pull a fast one (which in a way it was). As a result, the U.S. humiliated itself, insulted the forces of democracy in China, dishonored the martyrs of Tiananmen and reminded the world that old thinking from the 1970s still dominates on certain issues of American foreign policy. The misguided mission also seemed intended to send a distinctly ominous signal to the Soviet Union, quite out of keeping with the one Bush had sought to convey a few days earlier in Malta. Gorbachev and perestroika may fail. The U.S.S.R. may revert to its misbehavior of the past. But the Kremlin should beware: the U.S. is hedging its bets with good old-fashioned triangular diplomacy; however often its existence has been denied, the infamous China card is available for whatever poker games the future may have in store.

The U.S.'s treasured "strategic partnership" with China is valid and worth preserving only if it can be redefined beyond its original anti-Soviet reason for being. The same goes for all the U.S.'s security arrangements, in Asia, Latin America, the Middle East.

In its unrelenting hostility to Cuba, Nicaragua and Viet Nam, the Bush Administration gives the impression of flying on an automatic pilot that was programmed back in the days when the Soviet Union was still in the business of exporting revolution. Fidel Castro, the Sandinistas and the rulers in Hanoi are all, in varying ways and to varying degrees, disagreeable characters. But so are plenty of other leaders with whom the U.S. deals. The U.S. might be able to cope with these particular bad actors more effectively if it stopped treating them as Soviet clones. That very notion has lost its meaning in the past year.

In general, such American fresh thinking as there has been is too much focused on the question of what the U.S. can do to "help" Gorbachev. There is also the issue of what he can do to help the U.S., its allies and the rest of the world. He has already done a lot, simply by presiding over a Soviet Union that is easier to see anew as a great big country with great big troubles and that is trying to get out of the 20th century in one piece.

The cold war has been not only a multitrillion-dollar (and ruble) expense but also a grand obsession. It has distorted priorities, distracted attention and preoccupied many of the best and the brightest minds in government, academe and think tanks for nearly two generations. There is a long line of other issues awaiting their turn, and some have been waiting none too patiently.

The indebtedness and poverty of the Third World threaten the trend of democracy there. The indebtedness of the U.S., both to itself and to foreigners, threatens its prosperity at home and its influence abroad. The consequences of Japan's emergence as an economic superpower could end up dwarfing the current, suddenly fashionable concern over the reunification of Germany. The U.S. may have won the cold war against the Soviet Union, but it has gone a long way toward losing the trade and technology war with Japan. Meanwhile, the environment, while also newly fashionable as a subject of political rhetoric, is not being treated by policymakers, legislators and citizens with anything like the seriousness and urgency it deserves.

The U.S. and its principal partners have no coherent strategy for dealing with these and other mega-issues. Until now, the cold war provided an alibi.

No longer.

Even as he is thanked by the masses, Gorbachev is quietly cursed, only half- jokingly, by some in the foreign-policy elite for having kicked the centerpiece out from under the big top of American diplomacy. All of a sudden, the think tanks and back rooms of the policymaking establishment are filled with a new kind of head scratching. Some who have spent their careers fretting about the end of the world (the big bang of nuclear Armageddon) are suddenly lamenting "the end of history"; now that the good guys have won and the Manichaean struggle is over, humanity will have nothing but a lot of boring technical and local problems to deal with. It is a silly idea but a telling one, for it underscores the dilemma facing all Western foreign-policy thinkers * and doers, starting with George Bush: the fading of the cold war in and of itself does not provide a road map or a compass for the post-cold war era.

They should worry less about what Gorbachev will do next, or what the tiger he is riding will do to him. Leave that to Gorbachev. He has done fairly well so far. Besides, he has certainly made monkeys out of the experts and prophets.

If Bush can muster "the vision thing," he should apply it to the development of a new internationalism, a new geopolitics that prepares the West, and perhaps the West and East together, to manage the looming problems that will make the chapter now beginning every bit as challenging as the one, mercifully, coming to an end. Whether the new period will be known as the Gorbachev era belongs to that category of unanswerable questions on which it is better not to waste time. But whatever the next stage of history comes to be called, there is no question that Gorbachev has made it possible.