Four years after he came to power, political leaders and analysts are still taking the measure of Mikhail Gorbachev and asking themselves: What is he really up to? George Kennan believes that containment has at last done its job, and that the Cold War is over. Former President Reagan argues that Gorbachev is a different kind of communist. Western businessmen are flocking to Moscow to do business in a Soviet Union where profit is no longer a dirty word. But skepticism persists among those who remember Afghanistan, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and the Gulag Archipelago.
For these skeptics, the answer to what Gorbachev is up to is simple: He is trying to consolidate and centralize power in himself so that he can lead the Soviet Union to a higher level of socialism. He wants to go down in history as the communist who fulfilled the predictions and plans of Marx and Lenin. Gorbachev is gambling that he can control the virus of freedom that he has let loose with glasnost, improve the economy and satisfy the consumer desires of the people through perestroika, reassure the military and the KGB that he is not goring too far or too fast, persuade the nomenklatura to give up its control of the Soviet state, secure his own position as president and general secretary of the Communist Party, and keep the Soviet Union socialist. Compared with Gorbachev, Hercules had it easy.
Can Gorbachev accomplish all or even most of these objectives? How much time does he have before the party, the military, and the bureaucracy grow restive? What should the response of the United States and other Western nations be? In this month's Special Report, THE WORLD & I offers the considered answers of leading U.S. and Western
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