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By nature as well as by habit, the Soviet system has always run on fear and force. Gorbachev is now telling both rulers and ruled that it runs badly. But to make the system run well, is Gorbachev willing to lead his comrades toward a future in which command and intimidation are replaced by consent and competition? If he tries, will they follow? If they do, will the resulting society still be the Soviet Union? To judge from the resistance that Gorbachev talks about openly, quite a few of his fellow citizens are worried not so much about ideological purity as about their own personal and bureaucratic interests.
In foreign policy, Gorbachev is seeking a relaxation of tensions so that he can devote energy and resources to his domestic reforms. That is why he has been so determined to engage the most anti-Soviet of American Presidents in personal diplomacy. Gorbachev needs to convince international public opinion that he is one of history's good guys. So far, he has proved himself a master of low-risk, high-payoff gestures, doing things that in other societies would be considered only normal and civilized. He let Andrei Sakharov return to Moscow from exile, for instance, and thus earned the cautious, qualified support of many dissident intellectuals, including Sakharov himself. Gorbachev has been talking about the dangers of the nuclear and geopolitical competition in a way that is intriguingly -- or, skeptics would say, suspiciously -- similar to the way liberal Western strategists have talked for years. Sometimes he seems almost to be proposing an end to the cold war.
As public relations, this "new thinking" has been immensely successful. Gorbachev has outcommunicated the Great Communicator. Some recent European opinion polls have found that the man in the Kremlin is more popular than the one in the White House. But the substance of Gorbachev's rhetoric remains to be tested, and it could prove inflammatory close to home. Gorbachev's popularity in Eastern Europe seems already to be backfiring against the regimes in the region -- and therefore against Soviet control. One of the most extraordinary images of the year came last month at the Berlin Wall. A group of East German youths had gathered in hopes of hearing a rock concert on the other side when armed police moved in. The youths took up a chant: "We want Gorbachev!" In effect, they were invoking his new thinking to mitigate the brutality of the old order. The tactic did not work. The police cracked heads and dispersed the crowd. The moment did not augur well, either, for the more free-spirited citizens of the Soviet bloc or for Gorbachev himself. It demonstrated that, too often, Soviet power still comes from the barrel of a gun or the business end of a truncheon.
Marxists have long relished pointing out the "contradictions" in other political systems. Now Gorbachev is forcing them to face up to some excruciating contradictions in their own. Whether, and how, he can resolve them is one of the most important questions of the decade, perhaps even of the era.