Gorbachev: The Unlikely Patron of Change

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Gorbachev has been a powerful, increasingly symbolic presence in the world's imagination since he first came to power in 1985. But what exactly does he symbolize? Change and hope for a stagnant system, motion, creativity, an amazing equilibrium, a gift for improvising a stylish performance as he hang glides across an abyss. Mikhail Gorbachev, superstar: the West went predictably overboard in what one skeptic called its "Gorbasms."

But Gorbachev and his program of perestroika are far less popular at home. Estee Lauder and Christian Dior opened exclusive shops on Gorky Street. Meanwhile, soap, sugar, tea, school notebooks, cigarettes, sausage and other meats, butter, fruits and vegetables, and even matches are scarce. Only rubles are plentiful. As Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in his treatise on the French Revolution, "The most perilous moment for a bad government is when it seeks to mend its ways. Only consummate statecraft can enable a king to save his throne when, after a long spell of oppressive rule, he sets to improving the lot of his subjects." Chaos rides in on rising expectations.

Right now, in the dead of the Russian winter, Gorbachev may have reached his own most dangerous moment. Nonetheless, with remarkable imagination and daring, he has embarked on a course, perhaps now irreversible, that is reshaping the world. He is trying to transform a government that was not just bad or inept but inherently destructive, its stupidity regularly descending into evil. He has been breaking up an old bloc to make way for a new Europe, altering the relationship of the Soviet empire with the rest of the world and changing the nature of the empire itself. He has made possible the end of the cold war and diminished the danger that a hot war will ever break out between the superpowers. Because he is the force behind the most momentous events of the '80s and because what he has already done will almost certainly shape the future, Mikhail Gorbachev is TIME's Man of the Decade.

Some people regard Gorbachev as a hero because they believe he is presiding over the demise of a loathsome ideology. But he does not mean to abolish communism. On the contrary, he wants to save it by transforming it. The supreme leader of an atheistic state was baptized as a child. Now, in a sense, Gorbachev means to accomplish the salvation of an entire society that has gone astray. Yet he has not found an answer to the question of how communism can be redeemed and still be communism.

Gorbachev is playing Prospero in a realm ruled by Caliban for the past 72 years. He aspires not merely to correct the "deformations of socialism," as he calls the legacies of Stalinism and the incompetences of centralized economic planning. Gorbachev's ambition is more comprehensive: to repair deformations of the Russian political character that go back centuries. The Renaissance and Enlightenment never arrived in Russia. Feudalism lived on, and endures now in the primitive authoritarianism of the Soviet system.