Gorbachev Book to Be Published in United States

A book by Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev urging “peaceful competition” and a “nuclear-free world” will be published simultaneously in the United States, Canada and Britain on Nov. 20.

Titled “Perestroika: Our Hopes for Our Country and the World,” the 300-page hard-cover book will be published under the Cornelia and Michael Bessie imprint by Harper & Row in New York and Collins of London. A Russian-language edition will appear simultaneously in the Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloc countries.

In a statement issued with the announcement of the book, Gorbachev was quoted as saying he decided to write the book “because I wish to speak directly to people . . . about matters that concern us all.” He said his first book “is not a scientific treatise, nor a base of propaganda. This book is about our plans and how we are going to implement them.”

Harper & Row said it will issue a hefty first-run printing of 200,000 hard-cover copies. The price of the book was not divulged.

While collections of speeches have been published by previous Soviet leaders, “Perestroika” is the first of its kind to be written by a Soviet leader while still in power and is the first book written by Gorbachev, the U.S. publisher said.

Copyrighted by Gorbachev

The publisher added that Gorbachev employed neither a ghostwriter nor a collaborator in the project, begun early this year after nearly two years of discussion, and that the text was authenticated in the Soviet Union as having been written by Gorbachev. The Soviet copyright was issued in the name of Gorbachev.

Negotiations were conducted through the Soviet Embassy in Washington as well as through VAP, the Soviet copyright agency.

“Perestroika”--the word means “restructuring”--was completed several weeks ago, translated and brought back from the Soviet Union about a week ago, Cornelia Bessie, co-publisher of Bessie Books, said.

“I carried it back in my little black bag,” Bessie said, adding that the contract for the book was signed through VAP during the course of the recently concluded Moscow Book Fair.

No financial details were available.

According to Bessie, announcement of the book’s impending publication should effectively quash speculation about Gorbachev’s recent absence from Moscow.

“For the past week there has been great speculation in the press about whether he was sick and why he was not in public,” Bessie said from her office here. “I suspect this book is really the reason.”

But Marshall Goldman, a professor of economics at Wellesley College and deputy director of the Russian Research Center at Harvard University, said he doubts that the Soviet leader could have written such a book while also running the country.

“Anything is possible,” Goldman said in a telephone interview. But it seems unlikely that Gorbachev “has been able to sit down and write something like this,” he said, adding, “It’s difficult enough for someone who is doing it (writing) full time.”

Stressing that the book “looks forward, not backward,” Bessie said that the first half talks about Gorbachev’s “plans for his own society.” Gorbachev devotes the second half of the book to a discussion of “perestroika and the world--how he sees the world,” Bessie said.

She said the dominant theme of the book is that “war is no longer an acceptable alternative.”

Among Gorbachev’s conclusions, a spokesman for Harper & Row said, are an expressed aspiration for “freedom to reign supreme in the coming century, everywhere in the world,” and a call for “peaceful competition between different social systems to develop unimpeded, to encourage mutually advantageous cooperation rather than confrontation and an arms race.”

Message for America

The U.S. publisher said that Gorbachev further declares: “We want people of every country to enjoy prosperity, welfare and happiness. The road to this lies through proceeding to a nuclear-free, nonviolent world. We have embarked on this road and call on other countries and nations to follow suit.”

While the message appeared global, Bessie said the fact that “he gave world rights to an American publisher” makes it “obvious that he is speaking specifically to America.”

Book club rights for “Perestroika” have not been determined, nor have plans for paperback publication.

The Nov. 20 publication date reflects a hasty production schedule and is unusually fast in the realm of hard-cover publishing.

“All parties involved felt that early publication was an important goal,” a spokesman for Harper & Row in New York said.