Losing a Sense of Direction

...How was Gorbachev able to defy "the most basic laws of Sovietology" and democratize a totalitarian system that many of our experts thought could not be changed...

...This, in Kaiser's view, is the tragedy of the Soviet leader's success and failure...

...the "September Revolution" of 198 8 that overcame resistance to constitutional revisions...

...the old guard's counterattack spearheaded by the "Andreyeva letter" of March 1988...

...My goal," Kaiser writes, "is to explain how a lifelong Communist and successful Party official could change in less than six years from a modest reformer to the revolutionary leader who ended 73 years of Communist Party rule in Russia, and then lost his way...

...Nevertheless, Gorbachev is unlikely to give up his faith in Lenin or the Revolution of 1917...

...For like Lenin, Gorbachev must be judged on the sum total of what he does or allows to be done, regardless of the labels he chooses to pin on himself...

...No sentimentality binds him to the Party apparatus, let alone to the autocrats it has frequently produced...

...his decision to launch an offensive for government reform at the Central Committee meeting of January 1987...

...Is he driven by a higher principle, or merely by the urge to stay on top...

...Yet there are occasions—often in the prelude to a revolution—when the oppressive failures of an old system become intolerable...

...Nothing in history is so simply either/ or, thus Kaiser accepts the relevancies of each position...

...The first use the national minorities sought to put their new liberty to was leaving the union, an outcome that immediately soured many Russians on democracy...

...To be sure, as Kaiser notes, Gorbachev dithered and accomplished little basic economic decentralization in five years, except for legalizing small-scale private enterprise in the guise of cooperatives...

...Kaiser picks up the story there and vividly reconstructs the behind-thescenes politics at each critical turningpoint in Gorbachev's career: his narrow Politburo selection as Party General Secretary over the corrupt Stalinist Viktor V. Grishin in March 1985...

...Some Russian economists, on the other hand, complain that Gorbachev broke up the old command regime too quickly, that he had no effective market system ready to replace it...

...Although Kaiser finds the ans wer largely in Gorbachev's drive and political skill, it is necessary to look at the entire context of Soviet history from the time of the Revolution—to appreciate the impasse that Stalinism and neo-Stalinism had created, the frustrations of a society modernized but not satisfied, and the opportunity offered by the death of a whole generation of bureaucrats...

...Gorbachev and those closest to him frequently cite the pre-existing conditions of the Stalinist "commandadministrative" system and the difficulties of dismantling it in the face of resistance from the bureaucracy...

...a man of "authoritarian instincts," thinskinned and "narcissistic," who learned how to put on an act early in life and has been doing so ever since...

...Is he trying to reform the old system, or to revolutionize it...

...Gorbachev aimed for power...

...Reviewed by Robert V. Daniels Author, "Is Russia Reformable...

...his falling out with Boris N. Yeltsin in October 1987...

...Russia: The Roots of Confrontation " As the epigraph of his comprehensive reflection on Mikhail S. Gorbachev's six years of reform efforts, Robert G. Kaiser, managing editor of the Washington Post and former Moscow correspondent, borrows a line from Machiavelli: "There is nothing more difficult to take in hand...

...Many Russians," Kaiser observes, "speak of 'two Gorbachevs,' the apparatchik and the reformer, who often struggle with one another...

...This warning supports the conviction of conservatives in the tradition of Edmund Burke that any deliberate intervention in the natural processes of society will probably make things worse...

...His conservative shift revealed the limits of his reforms: He was bent on preserving the integrity of the country and some principle in the economy that he could call "socialism...

...He recognized the need for radical change, but was motivated less by a plan than by a "direction," as the eminent scientist Evgeny Velikhov told the author...

...Kaiser is at his best when giving a personal, three-dimensional portrait of Gorbachev...

...The main reasons for this are clear, even if the actual internal dealings remain obscure...

...Most foreign economists blame the crisis on the government's failure to marketize and privatize faster...

...This has left a population that fears taking any economic initiative, and that conceives of work solely as a hardship forced upon it for someone else's benefit...

...Gorbachev's démarche in foreign policy, resulting in the unprecedented withdrawal of an imperial power from its sphere of dominance, may be a more direct reflection of his personal perception of the world (and that of his liberal advisers Aleksandr N. Yakovlev and Eduard A. Shevardnadze...

...In the long run, though, definitions will amount to little...

...As to whether or not Gorbachev is really a Communist, we must ask if the term can still tell us anything about a system or a man, considering all the manipulations and schisms it has undergone in 70-plus years of Soviet rule...

...Gorbachev was willing to accept the consequences until they threatened to fracture the nation...

...They might add the cultural burden of centuries of autocracy and serfdom...

...That book recounted the convoluted progression of events from Leonid I. Brezhnev's death in 1982 to Gorbachev's emergence three years later...

...The short explanation is uncomplicated: Once at the top of the establishment, Gorbachev was much too intelligent to accept the dead-end rigidity and hypocrisy that had brought the country to a crisis of stagnation, cynicism and corruption...

...In focusing on internal matters, he points out that the splintering of the Soviet Union along nationality lines became inevitable as soon as the regime permitted people to say what they truly thought...

...Kaiser, however, has chosen not to emphasize this area in an already complex book...

...The political restructuring he introduced and the freedom he granted had run beyond his expectations, weakening the central government's control over the economy and the national republics...

...Still, this was the period when he was compelled to make political reform a priority in order to blast away the bureaucratic obstructionists...

...thenhe balked...

...Why Gorbachev Happened is solid political history in the best sense, and a worthy sequel to Shadows and Whispers (1986), written by Kaiser's successor in the Post's Moscow Bureau, Dusko Doder...

...When a world of troubles descended upon Gorbachev in 1990, he lost this sense of direction and with it the extraordinary tactical dexterity that had served him so well during the previous five years...

...To accommodate perestroïka, he has "repositioned" the Bolshevik leader and redefined him as the man of the deathbed second thoughts of 1923, not as the obsessive fanatic who forged the Communist Party and led it to dictatorial power...

...The climax came before and during the 28th Party Congress in July 1990, when he convinced the Party to abandon its constitutional monopoly of authority and to surrender the lead position in making public policy...

...the epochal first sessionoftheCongressof People's Deputies in May 1989...

...Soviet Russia in the 1980s was just such an occasion...

...As Kaiser puts it, "He had started a revolution he could not control...

...Clearly Gorbachev does not believe in the "communism" that was Stalin's radiant vision...

...than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things...

...Yet last fall, within weeks of his triumph at the Party Congress, Gorbachev suddenly turned back to seek the support of the recalcitrant Communists he had politically marginalized...

...the more he got the more he wanted...

...We see a man of intelligence and self-assurance, with the native political ability both to lead the multitude and to maneuver flexibly within the Party...

...The second big failure under perestroika, the economy, is harder to understand, not least because we are confronted with numerous competing reasons set forth by the Soviets themselves as well as outsiders...

...Not long ago he asserted, "Tobe a Communist today means first of all to be consistently democratic and to put universal human values above everything else"—a far cry from Lenin's class war to the death...

...Throughout, we see Gorbachev maneuvering against the Communist Party machine that had enabled him to rise to power, but that now obstructed his move toward democratization...

...But has Gorbachev remained a "Communist" in any meaningful sense, as Kaiser believes and as the President himself maintains...

...More recently, attempts to agree on a new economic program, such as Stanislav Shatalin's "500 days" plan, havecometo grief over the Soviet President's failure to contain separatism and the struggle for power among Moscow, the republics, provinces, and even cities and boroughs...

...Here Gorbachev can be faulted not for allowing nationalism to flourish, but for maladroitly handling its manifestations...

...a man propelled by ambition yet guided by a faith in himself and the nation, and perhaps a tinge of religious sentiment...