The Gorbachev phenomenon is the result of Soviet pride and Soviet shame. For more than a generation, the citizens of the U.S.S.R. have lived with that contradiction. They have had the satisfaction of knowing their country was a superpower -- and the frustration of living in a backward economy. They made their homes in crowded, decrepit dwellings. Shopping for necessities was a daily despair. Citizenship itself was often an insult and sometimes an injury. Their government would not let them express their thoughts or travel abroad. For years they could explain it all away: the hardship was the aftermath of the Great Patriotic War against the Nazis; the repression was a response to the ever present threat of capitalist imperialism.
But over time, fewer and fewer Russians fit the stereotype of illiterate peasants on whose bovine passivity Czar or commissar could rely. Soviets were increasingly well educated and well informed, in spite of the propaganda poured over them. And while they reached political maturity, their leadership sank into senility. The people cringed when they heard the doddering Leonid Brezhnev try to form his words and when they learned that his hands were so shaky he had to eat with a spoon at a state dinner. They told scornful jokes: state radio, cynics said, dared not play any work by Tchaikovsky in a minor key for fear that everyone would think another General Secretary had died.
The people -- whose name was so often taken in vain by their rulers -- longed for a leader with verve and vision, someone who would represent their pride rather than their shame. There was, therefore, a national murmur of interest in 1979, when the country got its first look at Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev at a televised awards ceremony. Not only did this new Central Committee Secretary, then 48, seem at ease among the ruling septuagenarians; he was the only one able to say thank you for his medal without reading from a 3-by-5 card.
Since his selection as party chief in 1985, Gorbachev has exceeded both the hopes of those who longed for reinvigoration and the fears of those, no doubt including comrades who voted for him, who worried that he would jeopardize the power and privileges of the elite. He has been a political dynamo, showering sparks inside and outside the country. His commitment to the still elusive goal of perestroika, his effort to make the economy produce what the people want to consume, and glasnost, an end to systematic official lying, have transformed the Soviet Union and made possible a transformation of international relations as well. What were long called, and accurately so, the satellites, or captive nations of Eastern Europe, are defecting en masse to the West. They are doing so because Gorbachev is letting them. In the U.S.S.R. the old order is not just passing; it is already on what Leon Trotsky called the trash heap of history. No one, certainly including Gorbachev, knows what is coming next. But whatever it is, it will be something new.