Yes, He's For Real Mikhail Gorbachev

For the Russians, tempered by centuries of land invasions, national security has long been defined as the control of territory and the subjugation of neighbors. Moscow's desire for a protective buffer, combined with a thousand- year legacy of expansionism and a 20th century overlay of missionary Marxism, was what prompted Stalin to leave his army in Eastern Europe after World War II and impose puppet regimes in the nations he had liberated.

This Soviet quest for security necessarily meant insecurity for others. It also, as it turned out, meant the same for the Soviets. "One irony of history is that the security zone in Eastern Europe that Stalin created turned out to be one of the greatest imaginable sources of insecurity," says Princeton Professor Stephen Cohen, co-author of Voices of Glasnost. It precipitated the cold war, provoked an armed competition with the West and saddled the Soviets with a string of costly and cranky vassals.

Thus it was understandable, perhaps even inevitable, that Soviet control over Eastern Europe would erode and its territorial approach to security be exposed as obsolete in a world of nuclear missiles. Yet even years from now, when the breathtaking events of 1989 are assessed, hindsight is unlikely to dilute the amazement of the moment. For suddenly, amid a barrage of headlines that a year ago would have seemed unimaginable, the architecture of Europe is being redrawn and the structure of international relations transformed by Mikhail Gorbachev's redefinition of Soviet security.

"These changes we're seeing in Eastern Europe are absolutely extraordinary," George Bush told the New York Times last week. In fact, 1989 will be remembered not as the year that Eastern Europe changed but as the year that Eastern Europe as we have known it for four decades ended. The concept was always an artificial one: a handful of diverse nations suddenly iron- curtained off from their neighbors and force-fed an unwanted ideology. Soviet dominion over the region may someday be regarded as a parenthetical pause (1945-89) that left economic scars but had little permanent impact on the culture and history of Central Europe.

Last week saw yet another series of events that reflected the upheavals of this watershed year:

-- In Budapest acting President Matyas Szuros stood on a balcony overlooking a rally in Parliament Square and said that the 1956 uprising, which the Soviets suppressed with tanks and the hangman's rope, was actually a "national independence movement." He declared the People's Republic of Hungary, so named in 1949, dead. Now it is the Republic of Hungary, an independent state with plans to hold multiparty elections. When speakers mentioned the U.S., the crowd cheered; for the Soviet Union, there were jeers. But along with shouts of "Russians, go home!," there were chants for the man who made the scene possible: "Gorby! Gorby! Gorby!"