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Most important, Gorbachev ended the Soviet subjugation of Eastern Europe. For decades, the key fact of life in Eastern Europe was that Big Brother in Moscow was prepared to use tanks, bayonets and KGB advisers to keep little brothers in Warsaw, Prague, Budapest and Berlin in power. Gorbachev put the communists in what used to be the Soviet bloc on notice that they were on their own. That meant they were finished.
Along with the new look of the U.S.S.R.'s foreign policy came the reform of its internal regime. Gorbachev has reined in the police state, opened the doors to emigration and introduced pluralism on a scale that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago.
On the economy, Gorbachev's record is, to put it mildly, more ambiguous. He has yet to make the transition in his own mind from communism to capitalism, so he has been part of the problem as his government staggers and lurches from the command system toward the free market.
But even in that respect, Gorbachev has stood Soviet mentality on its head: by opening the U.S.S.R. to foreign assistance and investment, he is virtually begging the West to interfere in his country's internal affairs.
Gorbachev has also radically altered and accelerated the course of arms control. In all three treaties that have been concluded since he came to power -- Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) in 1987, Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) in 1990, and START this week -- he abandoned long-held Soviet claims and accepted many of the premises of the American negotiating position. The U.S.-Soviet dialogue has been rewritten accordingly:
The U.S.S.R.: Here.
The U.S.: Thank you. Or, for variety: More!
The U.S.S.R. has conceded so much and the U.S. reciprocated so little for a simple reason: the Gorbachev revolution is history's greatest fire sale. In such transactions, prices are always very low.
Gorbachev came to realize several years ago that the apparatus of Soviet power both at home and abroad was expensive, wasteful, cumbersome, distracting and provocative. He set out to dismantle much of the old structure, not because it was objectionable to the West but because it was crushing whatever chance the U.S.S.R. had of making it into the 21st century as a modern, civilized country. All those missiles in their silos, all those troops in foreign lands, all those rubles and cheap oil flowing to Cuba, represented resources that he desperately needed for the Augean task of cleaning up the mess that stretches from Vilnius to Vladivostok.
BUSH: From Wait-and-See to Let's-Make-a-Deal.
When George Bush took office in January 1989, Gorbachev was in retreat. But was it permanent or tactical? Was perestroika in fact part of a larger strategy of peredyshka -- a "breathing space" that would allow the Soviet Union to reconstitute itself as a more efficient, disciplined and formidable adversary? What about Gorbachev himself? Was he Prometheus or Proteus? And even if one gave him the benefit of every doubt, who, and what, would come after him?