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Now the familiar edifices of the U.S.S.R. have crumbled; the center cannot hold. Yet paradoxically the leader matters more than ever. Now, in the absence of all those ugly but unifying structures and attitudes (particularly that of fear), he often seems to speak for all that is left of a single country. What he says counts because everyone else is arguing not just with him but with one another. If Shevardnadze's warning comes true and Gorbachev gives way to -- or becomes -- a neo-Stalinist, that personality too must be the focus of U.S. policy and the outside world's anxious attention.