Mikhail Who?

Since the ascendancy of Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev to head the Soviet Union, we have heard knowledgeable people and radio and television newscasters pronounce his name in a variety of ways: GORE-bah-chof, gore-BAH-chof and gore-bah-CHOFF. Inasmuch as Mikhail Sergeyevich, at age 54, has the prospect of being around for a while, we thought that we’d try to get it right at the outset. So we asked a few experts: Which is it?

Well, Yuri Algunov, the Tass correspondent in San Francisco, said that the name of his country’s new leader is pronounced gore-bah-CHOFF, with a slight accent on the last syllable. And an expert at the State Department’s Soviet desk agreed that it’s gore-bah-CHOFF. But, the State Department added, Americans never did get the pronunciation of Nikita Khrushchev right, and there doesn’t seem to be much reason to think that Gorbachev will fare any better.