Gorbachev: The Unlikely Patron of Change

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Sigmund Freud once said that human self-esteem received three great blows from science. First, Copernicus proved that the earth is not the center of the universe. Then Darwin showed that man is not organically superior to animals; and finally, psychoanalysis asserted that man is not "master in his own house." The self-esteem of Soviet communism suffered all three blows at once but lumbered on for years in a dusk of denial. Despite the pretensions of Marx and Lenin, the system that bears their name is manifestly not the ordained ; design of history, not superior to all others, and not even the master of its own house.

Mikhail Gorbachev is the Copernicus, Darwin and Freud of communism all wrapped in one. He wants his fellow citizens -- and his comrades -- at last to absorb this trinity of disillusionments and reconcile themselves into a whole and modern society.

The November day before he met with the Pope in Rome (not the least of the year's astonishments), Gorbachev said, "We need a revolution of the mind." The metaphysics of global power has changed. Markets are now more valuable than territory, information more powerful than military hardware. For many years, the Soviets lived in paranoid isolation, fearful of Western culture (an old Russian tradition) and estranged from it in somewhat the way that Ayatullah Khomeini's Iranians quarantined themselves from the secular poisons of the West. Peasant cultures shrink from foreign contamination.

Gorbachev is a sort of Zen genius of survival, a nimble performer who can dance a side step, a showman and manipulator of reality, a suave wolf tamer. He has a way of turning desperate necessities into opportunities and even virtues.

Much more than that, Gorbachev is a visionary enacting a range of complex and sometimes contradictory roles. He is simultaneously the communist Pope and the Soviet Martin Luther, the apparatchik as Magellan and McLuhan. The Man of the Decade is a global navigator.