Then Came Gorbachev

Mikhail Gorbachev. As I watched the man at a reception in the Palace of Congresses at the Kremlin, where my outstretched hand had been pushed aside by Yoko Ono's mad charge topresent the top Bolshevik with some memento of John Lennon's music, while off to the side, Gore Vidal sought to engage Andrei Sakharov, just released from his exile in Gorky, and Andrei Gromyko wanly smiled at Norman Mailer, it seemed as if we had all just stepped through the looking glass.

Unbelievable. A pragmatic and appealing Soviet leader replacing the septuagenarian hacks who had seemed destined to run that nation into the ground. Before him, there seemed little hope for altering the collision course of the superpowers. After him, the Soviet Union and the Cold War would never be the same.

How did it happen? What playwright would dare introduce a character who is such an immense departure from the characters who preceeded him? Who is Gorbachev, what does he represent, who are the people around him and will he last?

For three months in the spring and the fall of 1987, the year of glasnost(openness) and perestroika(restructuring), I talked with the new Soviet elite--leading editors, Central Committee and Politburo members of the Communist Party, high government technicians who had been swept into power by this new man and his program. I talked also with the new crew running the Chernobyl nuclear power plant after the disaster that, more than any other factor, had jolted the Soviet leaders into a full appreciation of what nuclear weapons might do. And I talked with the people who had gone to college with Gorbachev to glimpse the roots of this man who, like Peter the Great, would attempt once again the great Westernization of Mother Russia.

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Documenting Gorbachev's biography and many other facets of Soviet life remains difficult in that still-closed society, but it is now possible to begin a serious inquiry that would have been impossible just a few years ago. That is why I went.

It helped that a number of the people I talked with were familiar with my writing on arms control and other U.S. foreign-policy issues. My earlier trips to the Soviet Union, my articles for the Los Angeles Times and my book on Reagan's nuclear strategy were a kind of calling card, in their view, and so they were willing to skip a lot of jargon and skim a lot of basics.

I have had a lifetime of being lectured and lied to in capitals from Hanoi to Washington and from Cairo to Havana. But nowhere was the interview process reduced to such depthsof stultification as in the Soviet Union of the recent past. On my trips there during the Sixties and the early Seventies, the effect of reporting on the Soviet line was so--boring is the only word that fits--that I resolved never to return again as a journalist.

This time, I was shocked by the pace of change in my area of interest. I don't mean changes in factory management, chicken production or even the democratization of the Communist Party, all of which have been promised by Gorbachev and are still emerging. But out there on my beat, armed with my tape recorder, notebooks and lots of questions, the new mood was intoxicating. Who in his right mind could have predicted that talking with Soviet officials and other notables might prove stimulating, even--Marx forbid--fun?

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Over seemingly endless trays of cookies and tea served in the Politburo offices of Aleksandr Yakovlev, the far-larger quarters inherited by Ivan Laptev, editor of Izvestia, the government newspaper, or the downright dingy and cluttered cubicle of cinematographer and pacifist Alex Aleksandrov, the themes and the spirit were similar. The message was a replay of Lenin's old question What is to be done? It seemed again a call for a revolution within the revolution, rendered more urgent now that much of the post-Lenin program has been judged a failure. What is to come? What kind of economy? How much pluralism? What about bureaucracy and human rights? I found the questions--an urgent, constant pecking at the once forbidden--mostly brash and open. The answers elusive. All the more elusive since none of this change is occurring without resistance, which is pervasive and palpable.

This uncertain chapter of Soviet history, with its vast implications for the world, took most people by surprise. But if you listened closely, you could hear the sound of change coming even before the reign of Gorbachev, in the final days of Yuri Andropov. He was the dour K.G.B. chief who, in his brief 15 months as head of all the Russias, managed to set in motion the process now called perestroika. Georgi Arbatov, the director of the United States of America and Canada Institute, was the first to sing Andropov's praises to me. "He is a modern man and if he lives, you will see big changes," Arbatov had said when I first encountered him in 1983 at the Amsterdam conference of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. Andropov didn't get his chance, but he did have an impact.

As head of the K.G.B., Andropov learned the full truth of the sorry state of the Soviet economy and the degree of corruption that ran rampant through its political life. Rather than join in sharing the spoils, he began plotting the demise of the Brezhnev era by advancing the careers of men such as Gorbachev, who appeared to have avoided corruption. While Andropov certainly had the blood of K.G.B. repression on his hands, he seemed, by his own brief actions as General Secretary, and by the company he chose to keep, to have been committed to a better way.

During one afternoon Arbatov spent with me, ruminating in the den of his cluttered office in a 19th Century merchant's house in Moscow in 1987, he showed me a poem that Andropov had sent to him in the last weeks of his life, which contained the line "It is said that power corrupts men, but I have learned that it is men who corrupt power."

Did it begin, then, with a revulsion against corruption? It is an odd thought, considering that the elite pushing for reform could easily have gone the other way and simply have indulged the perks of their privileged rank. Arbatov and his men work in the high-ceilinged, chandeliered rooms of a mansion once occupied by a confidant of the czar, but they are now frantic and overworked. Why, in the cubbyholes of this sagging, dimly lit building, are Arbatov and the (relatively) young army of reformers with whom he has surrounded himself willing to risk another turn of the wheel?

Arbatov was born soon after the Revolution, is part Jewish, was wounded at Stalingrad and has been close to the last four heads of government. He can be both charming and tough, and he knows the West; for decades, he has traveled there several times a year, meeting its leaders. Indeed, he appears to know the West and its leaders better than most of the Western reporters who seek to interview him. Some don't like Arbatov. I do. They claim that he is an elusive propagandist. I find him as honest as you can expect from a top man in any organization.

Late one day, I sat in the old merchant's tearoom with Arbatov and three of his top aides, trying to make a brand-new Japanese VCR work. After some false starts, the machine began, and we watched a video cassette of the once-banned movie Repentance--now being shown to millions of Soviet moviegoers--which in a chilling fashion excoriates the crimes of Stalin and Beria, his secret-police chief. When the movie ended, Arbatov asked me for my reaction. I replied that after watching the movie, I could not understand why he or the others in the room remained in the Communist Party. There was an awkward pause, and he answered, "That is the challenge."

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In the West, the idea of actually being a Communist is rarely taken seriously. When it is, it generally means something dark, totalitarian. It means coercion at best, repression at worst. And after 40 years of Cold War, the notion that communism may occasionally touch an idealistic impulse at some point in the lives of its followers is as difficult for a Westerner to accept as convincing Palestinians of Zionist idealism. Yet despite everything, it's there. Otherwise, Gorbachev--and Andropov before him--makes no sense.

The men around Gorbachev called themselves the Khrushchev generation. They were the group of future leaders most affected by Khrushchev's bold indictment of at least some of Stalin's darkest deeds. Despite Khrushchev's rashness and his fall from grace, it was during his regime that the younger men first saw the possibilities of change. "Our generation was waiting in the wings to make these changes," Gennadi Gerasimov, Gorbachev's press spokesman, told me this spring. "The only question is why we didn't move sooner."

It is ironic that the battle to limit arbitrary power was next advanced by Andropov, one of Beria's successors in the secret police. But in the land of the czars, one takes what one gets. Andropov's enduring legacy is that, from his deathbed, tied to a kidney-dialysis machine, he somehow managed to nudge into place a new elite, which, though stalled by Konstantin Chernenko, his immediate successor, has now come to the fore. The new elite is remaking Soviet society in a way not predicted by a single Kremlinologist, most of whom had developed emotional and professional stakes in the idea of a Soviet Union governed in perpetuity by corrupt, brutal gangs of aging and unyielding Bolsheviks.

The members of this new elite aren't particularly mysterious, as I discovered in months of interviews. They are inveterate travelers, for one thing, especially to America, and one cannot help thinking that their goals are more the working out of their own domestic problems than the pursuit of some monolithic foreign-policy objective. In January 1988, for example, I was in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, at a small retreat hosted by the Eisenhower World Affairs Institute and the United States Information Agency. About 50 Soviets and Americans representing their respective cultural establishments hunkered down in that sleepy but historic town, drinking beer at the old inns and visiting the Civil War graves, which reminded one of the imperfections of our own national experience. While socializing, everyone was chatty and off guard. But once the sessions began, one side reverted to its expected Cold War role--and I don't mean the Soviets.

Our side, which included Lisa Jameson, head of the Soviet desk at the National Security Council, the coordinator of the USIA Soviet-exchange program and a hawkish Congressional aide, reminded me of the Soviet delegates I used to run into--generally stodgy and always careful not to betray their "cause." Although a couple of American delegates from the art world enlivened things, in general, they perceived the meeting as yet another battle of Cold War politics.

The Soviets, by contrast, were freewheeling and often divided. At one moment, the director of the Taganka Theater took on a high official from the ministry of culture. The subject was whether a theater director needed to get approval to accept an offer to stage a play abroad. Both men were young and loose. "You never answer my phone calls," said the director. "Why should I have to go through your ministry when I can make my own arrangements around the world?"

A leading Soviet cosmonaut on the panel, who had seemed bored at the proceedings, suddenly sprang to life. "The theater company is government-financed!" he said. "It's not your personal property; how can you just go running off everywhere you want?"

The director shot back that cosmonauts are highly paid and know nothing of the economic hardships of the acting class: "My actors have to work as waiters! The theater is dark for two months every summer and I have to feed them; you maybe don't know about such problems."

Then two top men in the Soviet book-publishing world crossed swords over their positions on the director's rights; a celebrated Soviet hockey goalie muttered that it was a fight about nothing and that all present should go out to eat. A columnist for Izvestia ended the match by holding up his hands and saying sardonically, "Well, this is perestroika."

(continued on page 80)Then came Gorbachev (continued from page 72)

Even more surprising, when I announced that I wanted to write about the exchange, the Soviets, to a man and woman, said, in effect, "Go for it." It was the Americans who, in general, wanted to keep it off the record, arguing that this was a private retreat. But since what I was reporting concerned the Soviets, and they were the ones who had to worry about how it would play in Moscow, I went with their vote for glasnost--openness, remember.

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During earlier visits to the Soviet Union in 1963, I had witnessed the optimism of the Khrushchev era--when Stalin's crimes were first discussed openly--deteriorate into what was essentially a sterile society in 1970. The first inkling of what the future might hold was given to me in Amsterdam in 1983 by Arbatov. He was open to argument, spoke on the record and was capable of controversial comments. But the best thing he did for me at that meeting was to point out a stout fellow down the hall whom he suggested I interview on scientific and nuclear-weapons issues.

So I approached Yevgeny Velikhov. Remember that it was not so long ago that no top Soviet would consent to an interview without an eyewitness, or a K.G.B. guide, present, and the answers all came out as party-line static. But here was a top Soviet physicist and member of the Central Committee willing to disappear with me into a hotel room to face several tape recorders and some barbed questions. Velikhov would later confess that one of his remarks to me that, "of course," we do have our crazies who might also want to build a Star Wars system caused him some moments of discomfort.

But Velikhov is a brave man, as he would later demonstrate when he risked at least some years of his life flying in a helicopter over Chernobyl, desperately seeking a way of containing the smoldering disaster below him. And, as is well known to a large number of American scientists who have dealt with him on many sensitive intelligence matters (including getting the supersecret Krasnoyarsk radar installation open to Western inspection), he is driven by an urge for honesty.

It is an urge born early in his student days, when he sought to master the rigors of the scientific method at a time when the madman Lysenko controlled Soviet science. (Velikhov was a few years behind Gorbachev, but part of his generation.) He would later tell me that the computer gap and other failures of modern Soviet technology stem precisely from the heavy hand of such political interference. Nevertheless, the physical sciences always fared better than the social sciences in the Soviet Union. The physical scientists were better positioned to defend their turf, because the preservation of their scientific methods was vital for the national defense. As Velikhov put it, "The social scientists just started to repeat or illustrate the political development, and after this, it was not science at all. Science is very demanding; if you are not honest with science, you lose very fast."

The revolt of the scientists, led by the hard scientists, is basic to the coming of the Gorbachev revolution, and they had their first success with Sakharov's rehabilitation.

I was at the February 1987 Moscow peace conference that Sakharov attended upon his return from Gorky. I caught up with him at the cloakroom as he was bundling up to go out into the cold. He granted a short interview in which he made the same critical remarks about the Soviet presence in Afghanistan and human rights that he had tried to make from internal exile. Who would have thought that a little more than a year later, the Soviets would be getting out of Afghanistan and that Sakharov would be supporting Gorbachev in his efforts in restructuring Soviet society? Or, as he put it in The New York Times, "I think this kind of leader is needed in a great country at such a decisive moment in history."

Sakharov's unrepentant presence as a delegate at that conference had to be one of the most amazing moments in all Russian history. At the closing session, he was seated in the grand hall of the Kremlin about 30 rows back from the stage. Gorbachev was on the dais, listening intently, while Frank Von Hipple from Princeton, summarizing the work of the scientists' group, ended by saying, "We were especially pleased to be able to have the participation of academician Andrei Sakharov...[who] stressed the particular importance of openness and democratization...the theme for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize." And I looked. There was Gorbachev on the stage and Sakharov in the audience. And the system didn't crumble.

Velikhov, as vice-president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, was instrumental in the opening to fellow academician Sakharov. But his goal is larger: to free Soviet science and scientists from the restraints of all political cant. Although a member of the Central Committee and a close advisor to Gorbachev who has accompanied the leader on all of his foreign trips, Velikhov insists on the need for a science independent of politics. When we talked about this after a lecture he had given at Moscow State University on the history of nuclear weapons, in which he admitted to disgust at having to use American data because Soviet data are still secret, he cited a peasant proverb: "Hair is a good thing, and soup is also a good thing; but when you mix the two, what you get is not good."

Peasant maxims notwithstanding, the fact is that for much of its history, the Soviet Union has been ruled by a politics that is stylistically and substantially out of joint with the requirements of a modern society. Thus, many influential technocrats such as Velikhov and Roald Sagdeyev, the head of the Soviet Space Research Institute, believe that a profoundly different politics is required if restructuring is to proceed.

As Gorbachev said in 1987 in a major address defining perestroika for the Central Committee, "Reorganization is a decisive turn to science, the businesslike partnership of science and practice to achieve the best possible end results, an ability to ground any undertaking on a sound scientific basis."

But scientific openness is not compatible with a society driven by political paranoia. For that reason, among the reformers, the push for domestic change is inevitably tied to a re-evaluation of the Soviets' foreign-policy agenda.

At the heart of this new thinking is a challenge to the siege mentality built up over decades to ensure the survival of Soviet state power. It recognizes that 40 years of Cold War confrontations with the West and deep entanglement in Third World politics have drained Soviet resources without a commensurate addition to Soviet security.

"What is your interest to have a war?" asks Arbatov, who says the historical identification of land, people and resources with power has been turned on its head.

"The Germans fought for Lebensraum [living space], and now they have the smallest Lebensraum in their history, and they are better off than ever," he says. "The Japanese have less territory with fewer resources than ever, and they are the fastest-growing economy in the world."

As Deputy Foreign Minister Vladimir Petrovsky told me in the ornate foreign-ministry headquarters, one of the wedding-cake buildings that Stalin ordered built, "Nowadays, the initial Leninist (continued on page 142)Then Came Gorbachev (continued from page 80) concept that we can prove the triumph of socialism only through our domestic policies is installed as an official policy." Stalin's building has remained, but his foreign policy is finally being dismantled. Petrovsky is one of those who had correctly predicted to me that the Soviets would be leaving Afghanistan by the end of this year.

The change in Soviet foreign policy is more profound than most people seem to grasp. Put most simply, it appears to signal the end of the era of Cold War. Or, as Ray Kidder, a physicist at the Livermore weapons laboratory in California, said, "The Soviets have let go of the rope in the weapons tug of war." They have done this not out of some new-found pacifism but out of a recognition that the weapons race has hit a strategic dead end.

They know that there isn't anything you can do with the big nuclear guns that makes sense, and that their existence rules out conventional war between the superpowers. "The whole meaning of force changes now," Arbatov said. "You can have a lot of military force and you cannot use it. The only size of war where you can be successful is a Grenada-size war; anything bigger creates great problems. All of the intricate military strategies are built on a foundation of illusions, if you really analyze the fundamentals. How can the weapons be used, where does the present trend lead and what is your interest to have a war?"

This view was shared by Marshal Sergei F. Akhromeyev, chief of the Soviet general staff, who replied to my questions, "Today, the use of nuclear weapons is meaningless. No nation at present can strengthen its security by nuclear weapons. Mountains of nuclear weapons continue to grow. However, the security of the nuclear powers decreases." He also rejected the plausibility of any strategies for fighting limited nuclear war, arguing that the result of any use of nuclear weapons would mean "the entire humanity and the whole life on our planet would be annihilated." However much fun it had been for some of the Soviet wargamers to pulz around with "winnable" nuclear-war scenarios, the experience of Chernobyl took the fun away.

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Nuclear-war planning, indeed, is a game until you have gone, as I did with Velikhov's aid, to Chernobyl. I was one of the first Western reporters allowed there, and it was profoundly sobering to go through the scores of checkpoints and wash down systems and the eerie landscape where clothes hang on lines never to be collected and children's toys lie scattered in the neat gardens to go forever unused.

As for the cancers the disaster has caused, no one quite knows the rules of death here. Are the fish in the river safe to eat? Maybe, if the sediment on the bottom is not disturbed by the current. Here, we can go with the Geiger counter, but there, beyond that barbed-wire fence, no one should ever go. Particularly disturbing was the sight of a collective farm, complete with all the requirements of living: white farmhouses with blue trim, tractors and other farm implements, clothing hanging on a line and some children's playthings. All the requirements except people. And this was a small accident.

"With Chernobyl, we were able to mobilize the resources of the entire country," Velikhov told me upon my return from that ghastly area where one will for centuries be afraid to pick a flower, adding, "but a nuclear war involves many more frightening incidents, including the more devastating effects of blast and heat. So what could you do? Nothing."

Velikhov, the theoretical nuclear physicist, had come up against the reality of the destructive power of his science, and although he had never given much credence to nuclear-war-fighting scenarios, after Chernobyl, he was filled with contempt for such notions.

"After two weeks of discussion with the army corps," he said, "I asked, 'How do you wish to survive a nuclear war if you have no possibility to clean this small piece of nuclear garbage?'" He added, "Here we had no panic, but in nuclear war, you would have much. We had full access to support from all over the country, and only because of such access, we had tens of thousands of people working here. A soldier can be used for only 90 seconds in the hot place. After that, he is free for life from any [nuclear-related] duty, the same with pilots of the helicopters. It [the Soviet nuclear effort] cost thousands of people who are no longer able to work in this industry. Without this possibility to use the nation's resources, it would have been impossible to save the 135,000 people who were relocated. It didn't change my thinking about civil defense, because I never believed in it. But it opened the eyes of all people that civil defense is nonsense."

The impact of Chernobyl on Soviet nuclear thinking was profound. More than any other single event, Chernobyl prompted grave doubts within Soviet policy-making circles over the wisdom of continuing to put faith in technological fixes. Nuclear science had somehow seemed pure and logical. Suddenly, Chernobyl opened a window through which could be glimpsed a vision of what nuclear war would bring.

Chernobyl ended the debate between those who thought you could have limited nuclear-war options and those who thought that the nuclear-arms race was leading inevitably to the end of civilization. There was, of course, the additional fear fueled by the Reagan Administration's rhetoric about the winnability of nuclear war, which to the Soviets meant that adults were no longer minding the American store. New costly challenges such as Star Wars, coupled with a sagging Soviet economy, prompted a re-examination of what power and security mean in the modern world. The result is, I feel, a growing realization among the Soviet leaders that being a modern nation does not depend upon having a certain number of troops and certain kinds of weapons; it is now possible to be a nuclear Gulliver and an economic Lilliputian.

How widespread is this view? In the West, you hear much talk among Soviet experts about the opposition to Gorbachev from hard-liners. Perhaps. Who knows? It's still a closed society, and neither I nor the Kremlinologists are privy to the inner debates of the Politburo. But I tend to accept the assessment offered to me by Politburo member Aleksandr Yakovlev: "I cannot recollect any divergences on foreign policy; there is a very firm consensus, including the military." Without such a consensus, Gorbachev would not have been able to move as boldly as he has on arms control and Afghanistan, both of which reflect a commitment to disengagement.

The military people whom I interviewed corroborated that idea. In one session that took up the better part of an afternoon, I asked, perhaps once too often, if the Soviet military brass didn't really have a vested interest in keeping the urgency, self-importance and perks brought about by a heightened state of international tension. Surely, I argued with as much impertinence as I could muster, their very way of life in the military would be threatened if peace were to break out. Surely, I said, there are risks in the new peace proposals.

General Yuri Lebedev, a no-nonsense member of the general staff, pounded impatiently on the table. "Our security depends on our people finding the same quantity and quality of goods in the stores as your people find!" he almost shouted. Lebedev, whom some Soviet intellectuals regard as a hard-liner, insisted that arms-control agreements with the United States are part of perestroika and that it was the military who were behind the major proposals on cutting back arms. "During recent times, we have had to take into account that we have major problems to resolve--the food problem, reconstruction of our economy.... We certainly understand that to carry out these tasks, we need resources, and these resources can be obtained through reducing military expenditures.

"We have to give the people an example that something is being changed, and the first sign of something being changed for a man in the street is goods in the stores--goods that are available in the West. So we have a big job to do. But in waging perestroika, we are winning in a political and moral sense, and we are gaining our supporters in the West." Which is an understatement, given that in a recent USIA poll, 90 percent of the West Germans and 88 percent of the British had a "favorable" impression of Gorbachev but only 44 percent of each felt that way about Reagan.

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While the Soviet reformers see a reduction of military competition with the West as a necessity of their domestic reconstruction, they do not foresee an end to competition on other fronts. There is, for example, a strongly stated position among those officials that improvements in the quality of Soviet life and a move to a more flexible and pragmatic foreign policy will expose certain weaknesses in the U.S. model of development. For instance, Yegor Yakovlev, editor in chief of Moscow News, one of the liveliest publications to emerge in the Gorbachev era, is convinced that the U.S. military-industrial complex will actively seek to prevent an end to the arms race and that the more reasonable the Soviet posture, the more obtuse and warlike the American response.

This view was defended by Anatoly F. Dobrynin, the former ambassador to the United States, one night in a lengthy informal discussion in his imposing office at the Central Committee headquarters. Dobrynin, now a secretary of the Central Committee, speaks a Washington columnist's insider English and noted, "You know, this idea of a military-industrial complex was invented by General [Dwight D.] Eisenhower, not by us." And when I replied that surely, a comparable complex must exist in the Soviet Union, Dobrynin, who had spent more than 25 years in Washington, smiled and said, "When our generals retire, they go fishing. They don't become vice-presidents of aerospace companies or lobbyists to the Kremlin. As to the military industry, instead of tanks, it can make cars. We need cars, and the profit will be the same, because we set the profit."

"Our intention is to have a period in which we would be able to concentrate on domestic affairs," said Deputy Foreign Minister Petrovsky, who continued with a reference to Immanuel Kant. "This is the categorical imperative of our time. The best way to prove which system and which way of life is better is by putting your own house in order.

"Sometimes, some people here think that foreign policy can compensate for domestic shortcomings, and that is wrong. The roots of foreign policy are at home; for foreign policy to be effective, it must rely on a well-organized domestic order."

Such an order, according to Dobrynin, must include democratization of decision making. But he concedes that the institutionalization of public restraint on government is a novel question for Soviet society.

Ivan D. Laptev considers that the main problem for the Soviet Union. "The people must know everything," he says. "It's the main measure of control, of monitoring official activities to prevent mistakes, and that is the main value of democratization and openness in our society, so that the whole party will be prevented from making mistakes and people's eyes will be open."

Toward that end, the Soviet press has been publishing the results of Politburo meetings for the first time, running a variety of information from critical ministerial reports, muckraking journalism and some foreign observations. It failed miserably, however, in covering the recent ethnic challenges, particularly in Armenia and Azerbaidzhan, where there was a blackout like in the bad old days. But still the progress is remarkable.

In one startling article carried by Izvestia titled "Where Did the Nos Come From?" the author listed dozens of prohibitions ranging from dress codes to ideas. The answer offered was that the official nyets were the result of mindless bureaucratic imperatives.

Laptev refers to this problem as a "disease of thoughtlessness" and says that it "is a heritage from those days when it was considered a rule that whoever is the boss knows the truth, and this disease took hold of our psychology. Now we are trying to change this mind-set."

The tough-looking product of a Siberian orphanage, Laptev, whose parents died in World War Two, is also one of this country's new men. He started his professional career as a crane operator, while studying in the evening to graduate from the Automobile Institute. Eventually, he went to Moscow as a champion bicycle racer and entered the Moscow State University school of journalism, where he finished by writing a doctorate on the social and political problems of ecology. He has gone on to write several books, one of which, he says, predicted the rise of the pro-environmental Greens Party in West Germany.

After a stint working for the Central Committee, he went to Pravda and ended up head of the editorial board. After 18 months, he was "unexpectedly brought here to edit Izvestia," where he has been for the past two years.

Asked about the prospect of Izvestia's criticizing Gorbachev himself, the editor replied, "We haven't had him for long, but I think that if this atmosphere of glasnost is established, you can expect this criticism to occur." Guys such as Laptev leave one feeling optimistic about the future of the Soviet system, not just because they have the right intentions now but also because the system, even in its worst days, produced Laptev...and Gorbachev.

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Will it work? That depends on a lot more than the intentions of the new elite. As to its intentions, I have little doubt. Gorbachev and his crowd believe that there is no alternative to sweeping changes, and they will attempt whatever is necessary to make their society a player in the modern world economy. But they had better be prepared to hang in there for the long haul, because the stagnation with which they are grappling has its fans. I refer not to the conspiracy theories of some Western observers who point to presumed blackguards in the Communist Party. Gorbachev has proved too tough and resilient to be done in by such plots, if they do exist. As Gromyko, who has lived with many a Soviet hard-case leader put it, behind Gorbachev's smile are teeth of steel. He can play rough and has done so, and the current composition of the Politburo and Central Committee is largely of his design.

On another level, he has already been widely successful in ways that I don't think can easily be reversed. Glasnost has been introduced at a breath-taking pace, and as a result, the political and cultural norms of Soviet life have seriously been altered. A cowed population has been given its head and found it fun to be free. Of course I mean freer, for there is a long way to go to guaranteeing human rights in the Soviet Union. But it's still the difference between day and night compared with what was before. Three years ago, Western experts said that the Soviets would never introduce computers on a broad scale, because people could print and communicate on their own; now millions of computers are being introduced. One after another, the "You can't do thats" of the Kremlinologists have been refuted, whether it be in the cultural area, where once-banned books and movies have been put back on the shelves, or in the formation of thousands of private organizations, or protests against the abuse of the environment, national rights and even the war in Afghanistan. Lake Baikal was saved and the plan to reverse major rivers in the Soviet Union was stopped by environmentalists. And the Soviets are disengaging from Afghanistan.

Ironically, it has turned out to be easier to introduce a significant measure of political freedom into the Soviet Union than economic progress. The problem is not with glasnost but with perestroika. Restructuring the Soviet economy has not yet proved its value to the average citizen. The reforms have not gone far enough and there is a great deal of resistance.

The debate now unfolding in the Soviet Union is still largely within elite ranks; successful restructuring depends upon the continued ascendancy of the new elite that desperately welcomes this spirit. The opposition to it is real. There has even been talk of "paralysis" of Gorbachev's reforms, as U.S. correspondents gloomily report on resistance by political hard-liners in the Soviet Union. But it is difficult to imagine all of the reforms just blowing away. Too many of the new people, from Gorbachev on down, have made too public a commitment to the new course.

One hard-liner was purported to be Yegor Ligachev, who has been referred to in the past by the Western press as Gorbachev's number-two man in the Politburo. Around Ligachev, some Western correspondents thought they saw the seeds of rivalry for Gorbachev and his policies. Ligachev's departures from Gorbachev's policies were seen by those Western journalists not as the rough-and-tumble politics common in the West but as evidence that the reforms were going to be stopped in their tracks.

That analysis is too simple. Ligachev has resisted some aspects of glasnost but has evidently enthusiastically embraced much of the perestroika drive. He may have approved the March article in Sovetskaya Rossiya, which has been interpreted as anti-Gorbachev manifesto. But that effort was trounced by a subsequent Pravda editorial and strong statements by Gorbachev and other members of the ruling elite.

In any event, Aleksandr Yakovlev, who has emerged as the leading Politburo member dealing with ideological matters, is a dedicated reformer. His take on the movement of Gorbachev's reforms is like the admonition about the impossibility of getting a little bit pregnant. "Glasnost can have no limits," he told me a year ago. "We cannot talk about broader or narrower glasnost. People should know everything and about everything. Of course, we have people who don't want democracy at all. I would be insincere if I didn't mention that there are people who would say that glasnost and democracy will backfire. That's precisely why we need restructuring."

It has become an axiom of the Soviet reformers' new faith that past efforts at change failed because they did not make that linkage. But how far will the new leadership really go down the path toward power sharing? I don't know and neither do they, because the answer depends on many variables, not the least of which are successes in the economy and improved relations with the U.S., permitting a major cut in the bloated Soviet military budget. But I do know that most of the top players now empowered in the Soviet Union are betting their personal futures on vast change and would themselves be the victims if the wheel suddenly started spinning in reverse.

This is a settled-in society. Too many people have learned over the decades how to make the system, bad as it may be, work for them personally. They know when and how to grease the palm and offer the smile. They can do that talk and that walk. And now Gorbachev is asking them to stop, to sacrifice for a way of life whose worth, in the economic sphere, has yet to be demonstrated. "The atmosphere in our society has grown tense as the perestroika effort has gone deeper," Gorbachev admitted in his recent book, "and we have heard people say, 'Was there any point to starting this at all?'"

It used to be said that an authoritarian country can make its trains run on time but cannot provide more freedom for its citizens. In Gorbachev's Russia, which remains authoritarian, the reverse is true. And he must accomplish both to succeed.

But even if Gorbachev fails, there is no going back to the worst days. No Soviet leader since Stalin has become a Stalin. This is a different society from Russia of the Thirties and the Forties: educated, aware of alternatives. It operates in a very different world context. The Soviets, liberals and conservatives alike, know very well that they must function in a post nuclear, jet-age, computerized world in which the rhythms of the old Red Army songs and the rumble of its tanks are just so much static interfering with what people really want to do. That is, to tune in a clear satellite picture of real life as the modern world is living it, then play it back on the VCR.

What makes one optimistic, ultimately, is less faith in the Soviets, or in Gorbachev, than in a recognition that the world's evolution has made Cold War more untenable for modern life. Secrecy, paranoia, militarism, chauvinism are all out of sync with the requirements of this new age, which is fluid, changeable, dependent on new information from all sources and internationalist. The new generation, with or without Gorbachev, was waiting, as Gerasimov put it, in the wings. The failed militarists of old, Japan and Germany, have shown the new way: power without military might. Freedom is now established, for all to see, as the essential conductor of progress.

If this sounds Utopian, bear in mind that Communists put a lot of stock in written declarations of purpose--manifestoes--whether by Hegel, Engels, Marx or Lenin. And here is what Gorbachev, the current head of the Soviet Communist Party, wrote: "It is no longer a question of whether [we] will continue the policy of glasnost .... We need glasnost as we need the air.... There is no present-day socialism, nor can there be, without democracy." Sounds like a manifesto to me.

"There was Gorbachev on stage and Sakharov in the audience. And the system didn't crumble."

"Put simply, the change in Soviet foreign policy appears to signal the end of the Cold War era."