Gorbachev Touch

When Franklin Roosevelt set out to rescue capitalism from the Depression, he had little use for rigidly defined objectives. Improvisation corrected by feedback, that was Roosevelt's way. "The country needs bold, persistent experimentation," he declared. "Take a method and try it; if it fails, admit it and try another. But above all try something."

As Mikhail Gorbachev seeks to save Soviet communism by transforming it, his political style resembles Roosevelt's. His skills had better be at least as formidable as F.D.R.'s because the challenge he faces is even more daunting. The Depression was one rough patch in American history; for the Soviet Union, history itself has been 72 years of bad road.

Whatever happens to Gorbachev and his risky experiment, he already qualifies as a political genius, if only because he radiates a sense of purpose, motion, decisiveness and hope -- in short, "the vision thing." While Western experts bicker over whether he knows what he is doing and where he is going, Gorbachev gives the impression that he has as many answers as they have questions. Part of his acumen is his sure feel for what is truly important to his task and, conversely, a breathtaking audacity in discarding what he believes is less than vital. This year, without a great deal of visible hand wringing, he decided that Soviet domination of Eastern Europe was a drag on his campaign to restructure the Soviet Union. Hence his emergence as the Commissar Liberator.

Alexander Yakovlev, one of Gorbachev's closest Kremlin aides, worked on a dissertation about F.D.R. while an exchange student at Columbia University in 1958. "What struck Yakovlev most about Roosevelt," says Loren Graham, a Sovietologist who was a classmate at Columbia, "was how Roosevelt understood that to save the system he had to give up much that wasn't central in order to preserve the essence." The lifting of the Iron Curtain shows that Yakovlev wasn't the only one who understood that point.

Gorbachev also appears to have learned, or sensed instinctively, what Plato and Maimonides knew: the greatest statesmen are therapists. A ruler becomes a leader and governs legitimately only when he encourages people to face the truth about themselves and therefore causes them to consent freely to their governance.

The Soviet people long ago became accustomed to leaders who lied to them. By talking straight, Gorbachev has shocked his subjects into a new kind of political engagement and civic self-respect. What is more, he has given content to his rhetoric. As a Bush adviser cracks, "I would be hard pressed to see how a CIA mole planted in Moscow would be acting differently if he were charged with dismantling the Soviet empire and transforming the nature of aggressive communism."

An American agent? Hardly. An American-style politician? Definitely -- the kind the U.S. increasingly lacks. Snowing the West has been easy for Gorbachev. Like Woody Allen's chameleon character Zelig, Gorbachev has adopted many of the West's favorite buzz words: stability, reasonable sufficiency, mutual security, the unwinnability of nuclear war, interdependence, human values, a civil society, the fate of the earth, the endangered planet. He has also shown that he knows what these words mean and that he means them himself when he uses them.