WHAT'S IT ALL ABOUT, GORBY?

How Mikhail Gorbachev, the man who changed the world, is now scrambling to salvage his place in history

DAVID REMNICK

Politics

Bloated and depressed, Nikita Khrushchev spent his last days alone in the woods, mumbling his life story into a tape recorder. "What kind of shit is that when you have to keep people in chains?" he raged to the machine. "If God had given me the chance to continue, I would have thrown the doors and windows wide open." But now, the old man said, "my time has passed and I am very tired. I am at the age when I have nothing before me but the past."

The moment Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985, he began telling his closest advisers that he wanted to continue where Khrushchev had left off, to open the doors and windows. And he was obsessed, too, with Khrushchev's failure, the way a string of vanities and mistakes had led to a pathetic demise: the palace coup of 1964, the years of obscurity, the secret funeral under K.G.B. guard. This spring, the last general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party toured the United States in the Forbes corporate jet, Capitalist Tool. He saw nothing odd or ironic in this. The crowds tossed garlands at his feet; plutocrats deposited checks in his name. He spent an afternoon with Ronald Reagan drinking wine and eating cookies. They reminisced about the Cold War, long over. It seemed to all the victory tour of the century's last great man.

But like Khrushchev before him, Gorbachev now sits at home in a government-issue dacha gnawing on the hard bone of regret. Nothing went as he had envisioned it. When Gorbachev opened the doors on the system he ruled, the entire edifice collapsed in a heap. He was like the man in the old Russian joke: After a terrible earthquake, nothing is left standing in a city except a single bathroom. The police arrive and discover a man inside sitting nervously on the toilet. "It's not my fault!" he cries. "All I did was flush!" And so with Mikhail Sergeyevich. The party he wanted to reform, "the initiator of perestroika," was shut down and may soon be put on trial; the union he sought to preserve is shattered (at last count) into fifteen pieces; "the ideals of Lenin" he wanted to revive now seem as distant and obscure as the faith of the Aztecs. All because he tinkered with Utopia.

Although Gorbachev has been celebrated more than any statesman since Churchill, he is bitter. At the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, Gorbachev was willing to let the raw wound show. The democrats, having fended off the coup, dumped him for the sake of "Kremlin ambitions," he said. Yeltsin "used the ax and the whip" to bring down the party. And now, he said later in Moscow, with society "on the edge of breakdown, they need to find a lightning rod. O.K., we'll find one. We'll tie Gorbachev to the stake of history. This is how I view the past: in order to seize power, to smash the center, they smashed the union too. What next?"

The old lion rages on, explaining, justifying, reshaping the narrative of his epic career. But at home, no one listens. Gorbachev is an unwanted man in Russia, despised by the party men he betrayed, and ignored by the democrats he abandoned. Many are ready to think the worst of him. Izvestia, the most authoritative daily in Russia, published a frontpage item in May saying that Gorbachev was getting ready to walk out the very doors he had opened. The first and last true president of the Soviet Union, Izvestia said, had bought a two-story house in Florida "with a lot of land" for $108,350 in a development called "Tropical Golf Acres." Of course, people said knowingly. Of course.

In fact, Gorbachev has not bought land abroad and denies any plans to emigrate. "I repeat, for anyone who is still willing to listen," he said, "I have no dacha in California, or in Geneva, or in Tibet with tunnels leading to China." Some of Gorbachev's confidants admit that he is angry and on edge, harboring both terror and illusions about his future. "Gorbachev fears he may have to flee the country one day like some kind of Papa Doc Duvalier," says Mikhail Shatrov, a playwright who is helping Gorbachev write his memoirs. "He knows only too well that eleven of the fourteen coup plotters have testified against him, claiming he somehow encouraged the August putsch. Gorbachev knows the situation is unpredictable. At the same time, Gorbachev has delusions of returning to power. Not right away, but someday. But it won't happen. He cannot return to power."

Just before he resigned last Christmas night, Gorbachev held a series of talks with the man who had engaged him in Moscow's greatest ego-power struggle since the days of Stalin and Trotsky. The battle with Yeltsin was finally over, and promises were made—or hinted at. Gorbachev made it clear he would not try to form an opposition. He was out of politics now and would limit himself to chairing a benign foundation. He would become a Jimmy Carter figure, worthy and marginal—a half-public man.

There was no other choice. "Yeltsin had Gorbachev by the balls," says Sergei Grigoriev, who was once deputy spokesman for Gorbachev. K.G.B., Communist Party, and military archives are now in Yeltsin's hands. We may never see all of them—K.G.B. officials have told me that in the days before and after the coup secret-police workers were dumping crates of documents into underground furnaces—but the few files that have leaked can only have embarrassed Gorbachev. There are documents showing Gorbachev's approval of secret funding of the Polish Communist Party even after Solidarity came to power. Another file shows him maneuvering to prevent the German government from opening the old East German archives. Sources say that Yeltsin has also come into possession of transcripts of his own phone calls from the days when the Gorbachev government and the K.G.B. were trying desperately to discredit him. Gorbachev's handwritten notes are in the margins, the sources say.

Moreover, few believe anymore that Gorbachev was ever an innocent bystander during the worst moments of the perestroika years: the military attacks on peaceful demonstrators in Tbilisi, Vilnius, Riga, and Baku. When Gorbachev was in power, he was constantly dodging blame. He could always say he was out of the country or out of the loop, and the hard-liners took the fall. But now even those close to Gorbachev admit otherwise. "I am sure Gorbachev knew all about what was going on in Vilnius and Riga," says Nikolai Petrakov, who was Gorbachev's chief economist. "Don't be naive."

Yeltsin has relished the demise of his old rival. He gave Gorbachev the last shove from power even earlier than agreed upon. Two days before the scheduled transition, Gorbachev showed up at his office at the Kremlin only to find that his nameplate had been pried off the wall. Yeltsin was in the presidential chair. "Mikhail Sergeyevich had to move elsewhere," says Gorbachev's aide and translator, Pavel Palazhchenko. "It was an extremely uncomfortable moment." Comeuppance was what it was. In 1987, Gorbachev dragged Yeltsin from a hospital bed and made him stand before the Moscow city party organization for hour after hour of denunciation that evoked memories of the Stalin years. Yeltsin spent the next several weeks under a doctor's care, suffering from nervous exhaustion. When given the chance to humiliate Gorbachev, he grabbed it.

Gorbachev is an unwanted man, despised by the party men he betrayed, and ignored by the democrats he abandoned.

Gorbachev's new base of operations is in a plush building in northern Moscow that was once known as "the School with No Name." Foreign Communists from nonsocialist countries used to come to the institute to learn their ideological catechism. The institute is now a scaled-down version of Gorbachev's old headquarters at the Central Committee. The resemblance is spooky. The offices are spare and bleached, and the same faces wander the halls, noiselessly: Aleksandr Yakovlev, Giorgi Shakhnazarov, Vadim Medvedev, Grigori Revenko, Pavel Palazhchenko. They are the last loyalists, that part of the inner circle that did not conspire in the August coup.

"It's as if his life has not changed," Grigoriev says. "The foreigners still come and go on. Gorbachev still lives in the same old closed world in which all the feedback is from the same people. As a result, he really never realized how unpopular he had become. As late as last October or November, Gorbachev and Raisa told Arkady Volsky [an old friend from the Central Committee], 'The people still love us.' Gorbachev should have expected his own fall from power, but he never saw it coming until the end. For days he expected a popular reaction on his behalf; he even expected help from the Americans."

Gorbachev's foundation means to do good works: organize student exchanges, bring together panels of scholars, develop model clinics to improve health care in Moscow. At the same time, Gorbachev has made no secret of his desire to make some money for himself. He is feeling strapped. In an interview with French television, Raisa complained from the backseat of a chauffeur-driven car about the family pension; in the Russian press, Gorbachev said it was no longer possible to live in Moscow without hard currency. In Moscow, these statements played roughly as well as Nancy Reagan's complaints about the White House china did in Washington.

Gorbachev seems open to anything now. For a sequel to Wim Wenders's film Wings of Desire, he played himself, wandering around a soundstage improvising a soliloquy on Dostoyevsky and the state of the world. For $520,000, Gorbachev sold the world television rights to his life story to an independent British company, Directors International, promising interviews, archives, and other access for a four-part series. Gorbachev even said he would try to coax Reagan and Margaret Thatcher to participate. As with all these projects, it is unclear how much Gorbachev will keep for himself. The producer, John Cairns, said, "It's up to him how much he pays himself, but his main priority seems to be the Gorbachev Foundation.''

Then there is the main source of capital for fallen kings: memoirs. At Stanford University, Gorbachev said that he is often asked about his motives for beginning the reform of the Soviet Union, but he wasn't about to give a full answer. Not here. He was writing his memoirs, "and I hope you will spend some dollars and buy them.'' The crowd laughed, though Gorbachev did not seem to understand what was funny. He is talking about a total of eight volumes, including a book scheduled for the end of the year on his last days in office. But publishers are losing some of their enthusiasm.

His recent book, The August Coup, reportedly cost HarperCollins $500,000 for world rights, and, while it turned a profit, the book was a feeble exercise in self-justification and warmed-over press-conference answers. Although Mikhail Shatrov has sent Gorbachev by fax a weekly list of questions to prod him along in the preparation of new volumes—"What was your relationship with the K.G.B.?" "What did it feel like to have to flatter Brezhnev?' '— it would be unwise to expect Augustinian confessions from such a guarded personality.

Russian liberals have reacted to Gorbachev's talents as a global "biznisman" with little more than an ironic smile. After all, the market is supposed to be open for anyone—even the fallen czar. But the party hard-liners and empire-lovers will never forgive him. Just before the coup, the K.G.B. chief, Vladimir Kryuchkov, accused Gorbachev of carrying out policies that were in perfect sync with the fondest hopes of the C.I.A. Kryuchkov is now in jail, but the attack continues. "Those who betrayed the Communist idea and the party have now privatized the party's property," the conservative paper Sovetskaya Rossiya moaned. "Those who are responsible for this country's catastrophe and who smeared the word 'Communist' are now making a cozy nest for themselves at the expense of ordinary people."

Gorbachev was furious. " 'Yesterday's men' are a vengeful breed," he said in a long interview with Komsomolskaya Pravda. "Before, they tried to steer us away from the democratic path, and now they are after me personally. Well, to hell with them! What am I supposed to be afraid of? The firing squad? The courts? I am not going to tolerate accusations coming from people who have spent too much of their time believing in the slogans of the thirties."

When asked about foreign bank accounts, Gorbachev threw up his hands in exasperated offense: "So that's how it is! Through your newspaper, with its huge circulation, I appeal to all bankers of the world. I give you permission to make available to the press information about my foreign investments—specific sums and data. Go ahead, publish it! This is just an extreme method of proving that I have no such thing, although that of course is nothing to be proud of! But the rumors that Gorbachev wants to go abroad and stay there to live on his savings have passed all permissible bounds_They can stop hoping. Al-

though many people would like me not to come back, I'm not running away."

Gorbachev left for California on the first May Day after the fall of the Communist Party. A day later, Capitalist Tool landed on an airstrip in Santa Barbara. It was strange to me to see Gorbachev in such reduced circumstances, at an event destined for the back pages. The last time I'd watched him come down the steps of a plane, it was August a year ago, and he was returning to Moscow after the coup. Back then, he was tanned and wearing the beige windbreaker of a man trying to relax, but he was obviously stricken, stunned, and exhausted, and Raisa, her arm around her granddaughter, looked worse. Gorbachev had "looked death in the face" when he was under siege, he said. Raisa was so sure that the entire family would be killed that she suffered a seizure that left her, for days, without the use of one hand. Gorbachev made a terrible mistake that night—the first of a series. He told his driver to take him to the Kremlin. He should have gone instead to the Russian parliament, "the White House," where the people who had really saved the country months, even years of neodespotism with their resistance to the putsch were setting off fireworks and playing "Hotel California" on imported boom boxes. Mistakes like that led Gorbachev to Santa Barbara, to this jerkwater airport, for the start of a two-week exercise in reputation restoration and nostalgia.

Dutch was there, of course, looking fabulous. Reagan still had that highextension wave and crinkly father-ofthe-bride smile going for him. The hangar was filled with his people, Hollywood types and corporate deacons who had made their fortunes buying up oil leases and huge plots of land. They lived plummy lives in the hills of Montecito. Two hours away, the embers were still hot in South-Central and Koreatown, and some pilots wouldn't land at LAX for fear of gunfire. But the riots in Los Angeles were as distant from Santa Barbara as the war in Nagorno-Karabakh. "We love you, Ron!" "Gorby! Gorby!" came the cries from the proles along the storm fence.

The next afternoon at Rancho del Cielo, the Reagans' spread in the Santa Barbara hills, the Gorbachevs were the new, dowdy neighbors dropping by for lunch and the grand tour. They walked around the grounds in the hard sunlight, chattering, meaning to be overheard by the press pool. Gorbachev was quick to praise. He went on about the greenery, how it looked like the landscape of his youth. Nancy and Raisa held hands, almost fiercely, the better to erase the image of them as catfighters on an epic scale. It was Nancy who had turned in fury to an aide at the White House and said, "Who does that dame think she is?" Now Raisa, having overdressed in a furry outfit and heels, suffered. She kept sinking into the California turf.

"I want you to know that Ronny built all these fences," Nancy said. Everyone quietly surveyed the fences. The press packet solemnly stated that the fortieth president had made the fences by hacking up 137 used telephone poles.

That's the way it went, dull and stiff, like new in-laws trying hard to be pleasant before the wedding. Nancy showed off her binoculars and assured everyone that she could see the craters of the moon with them. Gorbachev asked about the trees, and Reagan described how one of his friends had brought the seedlings in from Mexico. Dutch showed off a picture of Clark Gable. Raisa pointed to a barrel of geraniums and pronounced them her "favorites." The men talked about the difference between acres and hectares and real-estate prices in California and Moscow.

"Yeltin had Gorbachev by the balls," says Sergei Grigoriev, who was deputy spokesman for Gorbachev.

("Can we go yet?")

("Will they ever leave?")

Like so much in his life, Reagan's spread was more like a Hollywood back lot than an actual ranch. There were the four horses and Nancy's donkey, Wendy, who wore a red bow in her hair. There was Lucky Lake, the man-made lagoon with green, recirculated water that seemed more green than reality allows. And there was the fifteen-foot canoe, the Trulove. On the occasion of the Reagans' fortieth wedding anniversary, Nancy declared that there was nothing so romantic as cruising Lucky Lake in the Trulove with Ronny up front playing the ukulele. Today, she told the Gorbachevs, "we don't have a ukulele, but we can hum." When the chatter was over and everyone had posed for a picture in cowboy hats, Reagan drove Gorbachev in his Jeep through the woods and out of sight.

Everywhere he went, Gorbachev was reminded of his statelessness. At the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, among the hard-core right, the white-stockingsand-Ray-Bans crowd, the air-force band played "God Bless America," "God Bless the U.S.A.," "America," and "The Star-Spangled Banner." What could they play for Gorbachev? "Lara's Theme"?

In one city after another, they clubbed him over the head with the triumph of capitalism: at the Mercantile Exchange in Chicago, at the stock exchange in New York, with David Rockefeller at the Council on Foreign Relations, at the Harvest Burgers plant in Illinois. At Radio City Music Hall he was subjected to a Forbes-produced film on the victories of capitalism. In Fulton, Missouri, a sun-burnished frat boy with a "#1 Spud" necktie said, "My teacher says Gorby's a total butthead, but we think he's cool."

In San Francisco and Palo Alto especially, Gorbachev heard the feeble chirp of residual leftism: "I want to fight for that international revolution that Trotsky and Lenin first spoke of," one man said. Some Stanford boys in prepster outfits traipsed through the crowd carrying a banner: MAO MORE THAN EVER. Gorbachev found them all foolish, but answered in the earnest tones of a party instructor who had to inform his students that all the dialectics had gone haywire. "The last totalitarian regimes on earth are leaving the scene," he told the Marxists of California. "Policies of equalization are not really just. They suppress initiative and social energy."

The trip was a two-week-long hallucination of history. There was Gorbachev, the inheritor of Lenin, pitching his foundation, collecting fees and awards, hoping to pull in $3 million. In San Francisco, he was into a joint venture with the "environmental-impressionist" artist George Sumner. You could buy a print signed by Sumner alone for $ 1,500, or, for $5,000, one "historically signed" by both Sumner and Gorbachev ($500 extra for a frame with "black lacquer molding").

He loved it all, Gorbachev did. He relished the unending admiration of the American audiences and press, the legislators and students and businessmen who waited hours to see him. It was a strange America Gorbachev saw, wealth and little else, but all • the same he seemed to bask in Americanness, like Humbert Humbert on his own, illicit tour, savoring the supple names of motels, convenience stores, and schoolchildren. "We love Gorby!" they cried out, and, by God, he was grateful for it.

When Gorbachev arrived home and reviewed his clippings, he was stunned. The Russian papers either ignored the trip or poked fun at him. Some papers relegated the trip to a squib on a back page—the sort of play Gerald Ford gets when he beans a caddie at a pro-am tournament. Others tried to ram some bile down his throat. "In his own Motherland, this man beats all records of unpopularity and antipathy," wrote Izvestia's Stanislav Kondrashov. "The initiator of perestroika bowed low to the dollar. . .. For the first time, a top state leader—even though he is a former leader—went abroad like an itinerant serf in search of hard currency."

Enraged, Gorbachev quickly launched into a fit with a reporter from Komsomolskaya Pravda. "Am I allowed to ask a question?" he barked. "Everything that was said about this trip looked like this: While Gorbachev travels around in a cowboy hat raising millions for himself and buying mansions, the country and the people are in trouble. But how can you explain that America showed such tremendous interest in what I said and the answers I gave to all questions?

"For two weeks, the American press was all over me. I even had to give interviews in elevators. Congressmen even saw Gorbachev while they were standing. Something is wrong here. It can't be like this! They are interested, and we are not interested at all. I can add something else: the Russian government went to great lengths to exert a negative influence as regards my visit, on Congress and the White House."

It was true. Yeltsin complained that Gorbachev had broken his promise, that he was acting like a politician. Yeltsin's aides tried hard to get both Congress and the White House to play down the Gorbachev trip, to make sure the event did nothing to detract from their own man's journey to Washington. Gorbachev, for his part, said he supported the Yeltsin program but saw no reason not to criticize tactics.

"Listen, Yeltsin is not Jesus Christ. He is not the sort of person to whom I should be accountable!" he said, adding that Yeltsin's government had shown "authoritarian tendencies." "The new powers know how to destroy, yet they haven't proved they can also create something. The government needs to attract all forces, and yet it doesn't even think it necessary to take advice. We take the initiative to speak out, but it is seen as interference. To me, this is unacceptable. ... They want me to keep my mouth shut. Well, I have said it already: I am not running off to the woods. I am not leaving public life."

Yeltsin's response was chilling. His spokesman accused Gorbachev of sowing "political tension" and warned that unless Gorbachev showed proper "restraint" and "loyalty" the government would be obliged to take "necessary and legal steps to ensure that the course of reform will not be damaged." In the meantime, Yeltsin took away Gorbachev's limousine.

Yeltsin has relished his rival's demise. He gave Gorbachev the last shove from power even earlier than agreed upon.

If Gorbachev is engaged in a struggle now, it is, above all, a struggle for his historical reputation. ''Everything that he was going to do, he has done already," says Yuri Levada, a sociologist and one of Gorbachev's close friends from university days.

Gorbachev did not want to retire. He would have preferred to remain president of a new federation of the republics. But the conspirators did succeed in one thing. Through their failure, the leaders of the republics suddenly had the power to push Gorbachev aside. And now Yeltsin is the man of sterling reputation.

''Gorbachev is jealous of Yeltsin," says Sergei Parkhomenko, the lead political reporter for Nezavisimaya Gazeta (The Independent Newspaper). ''Gorbachev thinks that it's all so easy for Yeltsin because Yeltsin can afford to make these political reforms."

Some of the best minds in the urban intelligentsia—the constituency that Gorbachev courted and ultimately lost— now regard their former leader with a certain air of superiority. ''His speech is that of an uncultured man. He whips the air," says Leonid Batkin, one of the leaders of the Democratic Russia movement. ''Yet he is an outstanding man in his way, a great apparatchik. After Stalin, Gorbachev was the most skillful of all the apparatchiks. But when the time came for a real politician, Gorbachev did one stupid thing after another. ' '

Natalia Ivanova, a literary critic, compares Gorbachev "to the man who gave the orders to begin the fateful experiment at Chernobyl. He wanted to refine the machine, but the machine went out of control and exploded."

And Viktor Yerofeyev, a well-known novelist in Moscow, says that Gorbachev was "like Valentina Tereshkova, the first female cosmonaut. She fainted right away and was dangling in orbit but still managed to press the right buttons at the right time just because she was dangling in the exact right place. She took off, she dangled, and she didn't die. That was her triumph. The same with Gorbachev. Gorbachev pressed the buttons he needed to, and the combination of wrong and right buttons turned out to be just right. That created a metaphysical figure—a divine provident for Russia. Gorbachev guided Russia to its historical fate. He has entered the pantheon of Russian history, and gradually he'll come to be seen as that great figure. But not soon. Russians are an ungrateful people."

Even Gorbachev's most dispassionate critics miss the point of what he was and who he was (and the past is the right tense for it). Gorbachev was not Andrei Sakharov. He was not a moral prophet or an intellectual giant. He was not even a man of exceptional goodness.

Gorbachev was, above all, a politician. He combined a rough sense of morality with a preternatural ability to manipulate a system that had seemed, from the outside, unbendable. If, in the language of the Greek fable, Sakharov was the hedgehog, a man with a fixed sense of politics and morality, then Gorbachev was the fox, a man capable of both deceit and decency, consistent values and infuriating dogma, but a genius at a nasty game. An irreplaceable man.

At the Council on Foreign Relations, I got a little taste of that gift for manipulation. It was the sort of move that I had been watching and hearing about for years from my reporter's distance. Just before Gorbachev's speech, Palazhchenko turned to him and said, "Mikhail Sergeyevich, this is David Remnick. He was in Moscow for The Washington Post for four years." "Of course," Gorbachev said. "I already recognized him."

A full hour later, at some rather meaningless point in his speech, Gorbachev looked at me and said, "Isn't that right, David?" Pure mashed-potato-circuit hokum. But the man knew what to do— how to flatter and work the room.

With thousands of gestures like that one, Gorbachev rose through the ranks of the Communist Party. To take power as general secretary, he had to make sure the troglodytes of the politburo and Central Committee did not feel threatened. "We never knew there would be anything like perestroika," says Gaidar Aliyev, one of the politburo conservatives, who soon found himself fired. "We thought he'd modernize, improve things. But that wasn't all there was, right?"

Until June 1989, when he presided over the first elected legislature of the Soviet Union, Gorbachev chipped away at the totalitarian monolith. But from there, his personal story became tragic. He was dragged along by events and never seemed able to decide how to maneuver from one day to the next. "Watershed moments in history are not particularly pleasant to live through," Gorbachev said at Stanford with a trace of self-pity. "Before you stands a man who has been through a lot."

There in Palo Alto, Paradise's university town, Gorbachev delivered a speech that echoed the moment in November 1987 when perestroika really began in earnest. It was the seventieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, and Gorbachev used the occasion to declare the crimes of the Stalin era "unforgivable." The conservatives of the party would not permit a full analysis of the regime's brutal history, and Gorbachev had to be content at the time with hints.

But now, in California and out of power, Gorbachev wanted us to feel as though he had always been a democrat, a liberal, in his heart. Instead of quoting Lenin endlessly, he referred to Tocqueville and Jefferson, and the Russian liberal thinkers Solovyov and Berdyaev. He even thanked the dissidents for their "contribution to the intelligentsia and even parts of the party apparatus."

"Politics is the art of the possible," he said. "Any other approach would be voluntarism. . . . There were failures, mistakes, and illusions, but the task was to unfetter the democratic process.... I tried to use tactical means to gain time, to give the democratic movement a chance to get stronger. As president, I had powers, including emergency powers, that people tried to push me into using more than once. I simply could not betray myself. ' '

It was as if Gorbachev were talking to himself, trying to convince himself that he was a moral, as well as a political, genius. But he was no saint. He was heroic, flawed, and tragic—and that is a much more complicated matter. "Gorbachev is a man of incredible vanity," says Sergei Parkhomenko. "He longs to be in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. His main misfortune was that he could not attend the Nobel Prize ceremonies. He wanted so badly to stand next to Norwegian royalty and join the club of great men. But remember: this desire to be great helped him accomplish many things."

Today, Nancy Reagan told the Gorbachevs, "we don't have a ukulele, but we can hum."