America Abroad the Man Who Made the Ice Melt

By Strobe Talbott

It may not be at the top of his list of worries, but Mikhail Gorbachev seems to have fallen from grace with many Western experts on the Soviet Union. Even among some who applauded him in the past, there is not only a deepening pessimism about the future of reform but also a new, almost ad hominem sourness about the chief reformer himself.

In a characteristic blast, Aurel Braun and Richard Day, two respected political scientists at the University of Toronto's Center for Russian and East European Studies, recently called Gorbachev a loser who has been "mishandling reforms and desperately trying to cling to power." Variations on that theme, usually delivered more in sorrow than in anger, are gaining currency. A veteran of the U.S. intelligence community last week said Gorbachev's "blunders are plunging Russia into a new Time of Troubles." That is an ominous reference to nearly a decade of Kremlin intrigue, civil unrest and international conflict in the 17th century.

In a way, these critics are taking their cue from the almost apocalyptic way in which many Soviets are talking about their own troubles. Perestroika, said Vladimir Brovikov, a delegate to the Communist Party plenum in February, "for five years has brought us into crisis, anarchy and economic decay." Still, it is worth remembering that dissatisfaction in the Soviet Union, while real and legitimate, is wired into two new amplifiers: glasnost (outspoken letters to the editor of Pravda) and demokratizatsiya (outspoken delegates to the Supreme Soviet).

Something similar has happened with ethnic strife, a curse of empire since czarist times. In 1969 a soccer club from Moscow traveled to Tashkent and made the mistake of beating the home team. Uzbek fans went on a rampage and defenestrated several Russian students at the local university. It was weeks before even rumors of the incident reached Moscow. Now, when Bishop Berkeley's tree falls in the Russian forest, there is a camera crew from State Radio and Television to chronicle the event, along with several foreign correspondents, a visiting political scientist or two and an attache from the U.S. embassy.

At its most extreme, the currently fashionable grumpiness about Gorbachev implies a nostalgia for at least some aspects of the bad old days. Yes, Leonid Brezhnev presided over an era of stagnation, but perhaps that was preferable to the nervous breakdown that the U.S.S.R. seems to be experiencing now. Moreover, when Brezhnev was on the Lenin mausoleum, waving like a rusty windup toy at the troops parading by, there was a predictability to Soviet behavior and a stability in international life that in retrospect are beginning to look good to some.

A less perverse but also debatable strain of conventional criticism is that Gorbachev is improvising without a blueprint. According to three cliches now in vogue, he is riding a tiger, trying to stay one step ahead of the sheriff, leaping from one ice floe to another. In short, he has lost control of events and doesn't really know what he is doing.

Yet such characterizations miss the big picture, not just of what Gorbachev is trying to do but also what he has already done. "Events" didn't liberate Eastern Europe, rein in the secret police or lay the groundwork for political pluralism and parliamentary democracy. If Gorbachev disappeared from the scene this week, his accomplishment would qualify as more than crisis management and ad hockery.

Besides, Gorbachev may not disappear this week, or next, or anytime soon. He may last long enough to prove that he is the sheriff, perhaps even the tiger. But whatever happens to Gorbachev or to his troubled country, there is one thing that neither today's Kremlinologists nor future historians can deny: it was he who made the ice melt.