Why Gorbachev Happened: His Triumphs and His Failure

Explains the Soviet leader's ascent and describes how the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe began with the 1985 Reagan-Gorbachev summit

Kaiser's synthesis of the Gorbachev era lends crucial perspective. The book shows a pattern to events--breakthrough, loss of momentum, crisis, breakthough--as the Soviet president struggles to maintain political stability and initiate reforms at home and at the same time normalize relations with the rest of the world. Opinionated and authoritative, Kaiser, deputy managing editor of the Washington Post and onetime Moscow correspondent, argues that Gorbachev's reforms may do more to reveal the shortcomings of his society than to put them right, and that an ossified, rigid political culture will not readily learn democracy. And Gorbachev himself remains very much an apparatchik , notable for his partinost , or "partyness," a reformer who is not always able to supress the instinctive authoritarianism that feuds with his liberalism. Among his failings, according to Kaiser, are his inability to choose the right aides, his overconfidence, his vanity, his weakness for luxury, his inability to understand issues of nationality, his economic illiteracy; but Gorbachev's "fatal flaw" is his perceived mandate to redeem Lenin's revolution. Kaiser expresses enormous admiration for the Soviet leader for confronting the future, yet concludes that "the positive contributions for which Gorbachev will be remembered have all been made."
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

An illuminating, interpretive report on Mikhail Gorbachev's exercise of power, which concludes that his reforms may do more to expose than remedy the deficiencies of the Soviet Union's sociopolitical and economic institutions. Kaiser (co-author, Russia from the Inside, 1980, etc.) grapples with an intriguing paradox throughout his highly personal text. In brief, he seeks to explain how a lifelong Communist and upwardly mobile Party official could evolve from a modest progressive into a revolutionary chieftain who unleashed forces he seems unable to control. Unlike Gail Sheehy in The Man Who Changed the World (1990), Kaiser accords Gorbachev's provincial youth and early manhood comparatively short shrift, focusing mainly on his subject's dramatic career after he had climbed the Kremlin's slippery pole early in 1985. Among the more important reasons for Gorbachev's ascent, Kaiser believes, was the old guard's realization that the Soviet system had failed, making radical change from an apparatchik acceptable, even alluring. At the top, though, Gorbachev showed himself a leader with a sense of direction and a tactician's opportunism, albeit with no detailed plans for achieving his goals--a lack with far-reaching consequences. By Kaiser's account, for instance, the first summit with Reagan made Gorbachev a hostage to his own good behavior, i.e., by precluding any possibility of a crackdown inside the USSR's crumbling empire. As one result, Eastern European satellites gained their freedom, setting an example the Baltic republics are trying to follow. Their challenge to authority has precipitated an abrupt reversal of the Politburo's brief fling with democratic ideals--at no small cost to Gorbachev's global prestige. While his fate and that of the aspirations he encouraged remain very open questions, Kaiser notes that Gorbachev never eliminated the governance mechanisms that make dictatorship possible. A savvy, closely reasoned appraisal of an embattled kingpin who has been overtaken by events he initiated. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Kaiser, a longtime Moscow correspondent for the Washington Post , provides a solid account of Mikhail Gorbachev's political ascent and his current decline. While the former depended on the general secretary's "creative flexibility," certain "spiritual values" sustain him through the present "time of troubles." Because of Kaiser's grasp of detail and his wise decision not to attempt premature psychohistory, his book is of greater value than Gail Sheehy's The Man Who Changed the World ( LJ 12/90). Kaiser shows how Gorbachev succeeded in creating "real politics" in the Soviet Union but failed to redeem his achievements in stable living conditions. The impact of the Chernobyl disaster and the roles of rival politicians like Boris Yeltsin are especially well documented. Kaiser might have better explained why the reforms soured had he examined more closely Soviet social and institutional change within the last five years. Nevertheless, the book remains among the most comprehensive narratives of current Soviet high politics available.
- Zachary T. Irwin, Behrend Coll., Pennsylvania State Univ., Erie
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.