Hot Red

By R.Z. Sheppard

THE MAN WHO CHANGED THE WORLD: THE LIVES OF MIKHAIL S. GORBACHEV

by Gail Sheehy

HarperCollins; 416 pages; $22.95

If it is not an old Russian proverb, it should be: When skating on thin ice, move quickly. Like Gail Sheehy, who has learned some fast footwork and slick maneuvers during her career as a New Journalist and pop psychologist. Her biography of the Soviet leader marks Sheehy's debut as a pop political scientist.

Sheehy has the sort of drive and self-confidence that must have impressed her gloomy Soviet hosts. Like a laptop Barbara Walters, she attempts to bag "top" officials, those with "ultimate power." But the Big Guy won't show, and the Kremlin's First Lady, says Sheehy, "has never consented to an interview."

This statement is followed by a thorough clawing. Raisa Gorbachev is "a cultural and intellectual snob." She is tactless abroad and a hypocrite at home. "Despite all her moralistic lectures," writes Sheehy, "Raisa is known for doing very little to alleviate the cruel conditions that dictate the lives of most of her countrywomen."

Gorbachev comes across as a brilliant bumpkin from cossack country who could not have made it without Raisa, a doctor of Marxist theory and, in the Sheehy version, the real "prophet of perestroika." How two devout party members could have climbed to the top of the Communist apparatus while nurturing heretical ideas is the subject that gives the author her central thesis of how Gorbachev operates.

He is, like Soviet leaders before him, a master of doublethink. Sheehy eventually turns this standard Orwellian idea into what she calls her own "shattering insight . . . There is no bottom line to the Soviet socialist ideal -- it's a snake pit of hypocrisy."

If the scales do not exactly fall from the reader's eyes, it is because Sheehy does little to distinguish between what is banal and what is distinctive in her findings and her arguments. There are also problems that undermine reader confidence. Early on Sheehy writes, "Did Gorbachev change the world or did the world change him? I took as my premise the second interpretation." So how come the title of her breathless book is The Man Who Changed the World?