America Abroad

By Strobe Talbott

It is harder for a traveler in the Soviet Union to find someone who has anything good to say about Mikhail Gorbachev than it was for Diogenes the Cynic, in his wanderings through the streets of Athens in broad daylight with a lantern, to find an honest man. Gorbachev's unpopularity can be understood only as part of what is happening to the country as a whole, no matter who tries to govern from the Kremlin.

Gorbachev is blamed for the crisis in the economy. But the Soviet system for providing its citizens with the basics of life has always been a cruel and hopeless mess. Perestroika has been largely a matter of restructuring a ruin, a contradiction in terms that makes for a sorry spectacle. Yet the world is, as never before, invited to watch. Glasnost has led to a kind of reverse, and perverse, Potemkinism, a post-Soviet tendency to portray the situation as even worse than it is.

Take the scene of empty shelves in Moscow grocery stores that appears on TV news programs almost every evening. At least some of the food so conspicuously missing in state outlets is on sale but off camera, from private vendors at higher prices a few blocks way. That's what a transition to a market economy is all about.

Russians have said there are really only two words in their language: ura (hurrah) and uvy (alas). After generations of being forced to cheer, 286 million people now seem to be lamenting in unison. What's more, they are | booing the man who empowered them to do so. Gorbachev may deserve criticism for having not yet abolished the State Planning Commission, and numerous central ministries are still obstructing reform. But he has unquestionably dismantled the Ministry of Fear. For that he gets astonishingly little thanks.

Beyond the specific complaints against Gorbachev, there is a deeper grievance. Because of both the position and the convictions he holds, he is identified with the very idea of a Soviet Union that stretches from Tallinn on the Baltic to Vladivostok on the Pacific. That idea is finished. The U.S.S.R. was kept together by force; it now has the freedom to come apart.

Even those few of Gorbachev's countrymen who have a kind word for him usually qualify it with some comment to the effect that he is yesterday's man. As usual, they exaggerate. But even if Gorbachev is, before our eyes, passing into history, he can be consoled by the company he will keep.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez's new novel, The General in His Labyrinth, is about the last days of Simon Bolivar, but it can also be read as allegory. Having cast off the shackles of empire, tried to found a rudimentary democracy and earned the title of the Liberator, Bolivar dies in defeat. What he wants most is a single South American republic reaching from Caracas to Quito. But the passions of the revolution he led give way to those of separatism that he cannot control. His "golden dream of continental unity" becomes an embarrassing abstraction to his people, who begin following regional leaders instead.

"Let's go," Bolivar tells his closest aide. "No one loves us here." Terminally ill, fearful of assassination, mocked on the streets, Bolivar sets off on a mule toward self-imposed exile.

"It's destiny's joke," says one of his few remaining loyalists. "It seems we planted the ideal of independence so deep that now these countries are trying to win their independence from each other." Venezuela, Colombia, Peru and Ecuador go their own way.

So will Estonia, Latvia, Georgia and the rest. But even if Gorbachev, like Bolivar, fails as a unifier, he too will be remembered above all as a liberator.