The 1980s came to an end in what seemed like a magic act, performed on a world-historical stage. Trapdoors flew open, and whole regimes vanished. The shell of an old world cracked, its black iron fragments dropping away, and something new, alive, exploded into the air in a flurry of white wings.

Revolution took on a sort of electronic lightness of being. A crowd of half a million Czechoslovaks in Wenceslas Square would powder into electrons, stream into space at the speed of light, bounce off a satellite and shoot down to recombine in millions of television images around the planet. [an error occurred while processing this directive]

The transformation had a giddy, hallucinatory quality, its surprises tumbling out night after night. The wall that divided Berlin and sealed an international order crumbled into souvenirs. The cold war, which seemed for so long part of the permanent order of things, was peacefully deconstructing before the world's eyes. After years of numb changelessness, the communist world has come alive with an energy and turmoil that have taken on a bracing, potentially anarchic life of their own. Not even Stalinist Rumania was immune.

The magician who set loose these forces is a career party functionary, faithful communist, charismatic politician, international celebrity and impresario of calculated disorder named Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev. He calls what he is doing—and permitting—a revolution. His has (so far) been a bloodless revolution, without the murderous, conspiratorial associations that the word has carried in the past. In novel alliance with the glasnost of world communications, Gorbachev became the patron of change: Big Brother's better twin. His portraits, like icons at a saint's-day festival, waved amid a swarm of Czechs. The East German young chanted "Gorby! Gorby!" to taunt the police.

The world has acquired simultaneously more freedom and more danger. At the beginning of the age of exploration, a navigator's map would mark unknown portions of the great ocean with the warning HERE BE MONSTERS. Gorbachev knows about the monsters, about the chaos he may have to struggle across, a chaos that he even helped to create.

The potential for violence, and even for the disintegration of the Soviet order, is enormous. The U.S.S.R. is a vast amalgam of nationalities that have always been restive under the imperial Soviet system. To mix the politics of openness and the economics of scarcity is a messy and dangerous experiment.

Gorbachev and his reformist allies in Eastern Europe have managed to suppress at least one monster—the state's capacity for terrible violence against its citizens. The Chinese and, until last week, the Rumanians were not so lucky. The Chinese students carried portraits of the Soviet leader, and they were shouting, "In Russia they have Gorbachev; in China we have whom?" The yin and yang of 1989: tanks vs. glasnost, the dead hand of the past vs. Gorbachev's vigorous, risky plunge into the future. Gorbachev is a hero for what he would not do—in fact, could not do, without tearing out the moral wiring of his ambitions for the future. In that sense, as in so many others, the fallen Rumanian tyrant Nicolae Ceausescu played the archvillain.

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.

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.

COVERS GALLERY: Click here to see the cover image from 1989

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