JOHN A. ARMSTRONG (St. Augustine, FL., U.S.A.)

GORBACHEV: LIMITS OF THE FOX IN SOVIET POLITICS

The Western search for personifications of the Soviet sys- tem began as soon as the Winter Palace fell to the Bolsheviks. Given his immense influence, foreign concentration of Lenin was justifiable. Surely his successor, Stalin, as close to an abso- lute dictator as the world has seen, deserved the intense scrutiny he received. More surprising is the way that observers, including men as shrewd as Harry Truman, were -conned into believing Stalin embodied opportunities for postwar democracy in the USSR. Good old Uncle Joe, it seemed, was just being held back by a hidebound Politburo. Nor was this ludicrous appraisal confined to off-the-cuff remarks. In a carefully composed mem- orandum to the new president, such a seasoned appraiser of in- ternational personages as Henry L. Stimson argued: "That something can be accomplished is not an idle dream. STALIN has shown an indication of his appreciation of our system of freedom by his proposal of a free constitution to be established among the Soviets." Bitter recognition of Stalin's inflexibility did not prevent a wave of optimism when Nikita Khrushchev succeeded him. At the end of his regime, Khrushchev was nostalgically recalled in Washington as the man "we had looked down the barrel with" during the 1962 missile confrontation. By the blossoming of the 1970s "detente," Leonid Brezhnev, the General Secretary who replaced Khrushchev's erratic course with oligarchic rigid- ity, was also regarded as a promising partner for negotiations. Such fond hopes had little chance to build up during the brief terms of Iurii Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko, marred as they were by incidents like Soviet destruction of South Korean Flight 007. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that Gorbachev, new in office and representative of a new generation, should have been greeted enthusiastically. Nor is it surprising that Europeans, this time, took the lead in personifying their hopes for a new Soviet regime. For 190

decades the parliamentary systems of Western Europe had moved toward personal leadership. What Gladstone and Disraeli, Clemenceau and Rathenau accomplished by maneu- vers in legislative chambers, opponents of the false charisma of fascism felt obliged to secure by appearing to be democratic tri- bunes. The World War II triumvirate of Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin was replaced by the Cold War trio of Adenauer, DeGaulle and Kennedy, much later by the Thatcher-Reagan duo, substantially but intermittently accompanied by Kohl and Mitterand. Just as the hyperbole of fascism called forth demo- cratic adversaries of mythic personal stature, so continuing Western emphasis on personal leadership required personifica- tion of the Communist opponent. Nor was this trend merely an artifact of news media. Increasingly, incumbent heads of democratic governments realized that foreign policy constituted the most promising sphere for personal intervention. Not only were "summits" with the Soviet opponent opportunities for per- sonal accomplishment, real or apparent; Western heads of gov- ernment and their principal advisers sincerely believed that a few dozen hours of contact (however stilted) with the Soviet chief provided unique insights into his thinking. In such reliance on personal evaluations, politicians were in accord with media re- porters and numerous diplomats whose stock in trade was on- the-spot contacts, in contrast to the grubbing for social data and their convoluted analysis that characterized intelligence opera- tives and academic specialists. Nothing about his initial months as General Secretary sug- gested that Mikhail Gorbachev had assumed office to liquidate the Soviet empire. Some moves (like endorsement of KGB arrest of U.S. correspondent Nicholas Daniloff) even suggested heightened intransigence. Like all new Party chiefs, however, Gorbachev was determined to put his own stamp on the im- mense structure of Soviet governance. Probably-like U.S. pres- idential aspirants--Gorbachev and his predecessors were gen- uinely convinced that renewed energy and skilled organiza- tional shuffling can eliminate the "waste" that encumbers their bureaucracies, indeed their entire society. To the outside ob- server, Gorbachev's initial moves to curtail vodka production and his scapegoating of specific administrators compare rather unfavorably with Khrushchev's assaults, twenty years earlier, on the MTS complex in agriculture and the top-heavy Moscow industrial ministries. A decade younger than Khrushchev,