Soviet Change Is Under Way, but Can American Thinking Keep Up? : Some Credible Witnesses Wish Gorbachev Luck

President Reagan, in rooting for a victory by Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev over old-guard opposition to his reform program, has done everything but wear a Gorbachev campaign button.

Predictably, right-wingers are suggesting that Reagan was taken in by those slickers in Moscow--and by his own State Department.

Caution is always in order, of course, when dealing with the Soviet Union. But it is important to note that the President’s willingness to see Gorbachev as a new kind of Soviet leader, one whose success is important to the West as well as to the Soviet people, is shared by some folk who are anything but naive.

Andrei D. Sakharov and Alexander Dubcek, for example.

Sakharov, the Soviet H-bomb builder who turned dissident and became a human-rights champion, was sent into internal exile in 1980 for condemning the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. He was allowed to return to Moscow only 18 months ago.

The physicist continues to campaign for the release of political prisoners, and just last month criticized the Kremlin’s handling of unrest in Armenia. But in a press conference last week he strongly reiterated his support for Gorbachev’s reform program and his confidence in the Soviet leader’s commitment to greater respect for human rights.

The case of Dubcek, who as leader of the Czechoslovak Communist Party presided over the ill-fated “Prague Spring” of 1968, is equally interesting.

The effort to create a new, more humane and democratic kind of communism was crushed at the point of Soviet bayonets, its leaders fired and arrested or expelled from the country. Dubcek himself was ousted. He remains under close police watch.

In a January interview with an Italian communist newspaper, Dubcek saw similarities between Gorbachev’s campaign for the reconstruction of Soviet society and his own efforts to create “communism with a human face.”

Recently, in his first interview with a U.S. publication, Dubcek declared his “unconditional” support for Gorbachev’s policies and urged the West to support them, too.

One of the more interesting commentaries on Gorbachev comes from Zdenek Mlynar, a Czechoslovak exile who was a ranking party secretary under Dubcek 20 years ago.

Mlynar spent five years at Moscow University in the early 1950s. And one of his fellow law students and close friends was a strapping, self-assured fellow named Gorbachev.

Both young men were enthusiastic communists, Mlynar relates. But Gorbachev was also a pragmatist who, even under the Stalinist conditions of fear and suspicion, was critical of Kremlin propaganda that painted economic conditions as better than they really were.

Mlynar, who now lives in Vienna, had his last face-to-face meeting with Gorbachev--by then a regional party boss in Stavropol--in 1967.

As the Czechoslovak exile tells it, Gorbachev listened to his explanation of the then-emerging ideas of the Prague Spring. The future Soviet leader then expressed his frustration with the centralized, Stalinist system of economic management and his disappointment at the lack of reform.

“Gorbachev is a man who is capable of throwing out dogmas that have been in effect for decades,” Mlynar told the Washington Post. “I trust him.”

Most Western experts, initially skeptical, are now convinced that Gorbachev is sincerely dedicated to the creation of a new, more liberal and less threatening form of communist rule. But they still question whether he can overcome opposition from bureaucrats and party officials who do not fancy losing their powers and perks.

Something of a showdown will come later this month when a Communist Party conference, called by Gorbachev to give perestroika a powerful shove, meets in Moscow.

Gorbachev supporters are warning that the balance of power at the conference may actually lie with opposition forces that may sidetrack reform and even maneuver for Gorbachev’s removal.

These forebodings may or may not be justified. But without specific regard to the conference, Michel Tatu, a sober-minded French Kremlinologist, doesn’t rule out the possibility of a palace coup. However, he thinks this unlikely because, after all that Gorbachev has done to win favorable opinion abroad, foreign reaction to his ouster “would be disastrous” to Soviet interests.

But another solution that cannot be ruled out, Tatu suggests, is a fatal “accident” that would “allow the reformer to be buried with full honors while his successor proclaims the slogans perestroika and glasnost loud and clear”--but goes back to business as usual.

Gorbachev falls well short of sainthood, from the Western perspective, but is a clear improvement over his predecessors.

There is, in any event, little that the West can do to affect the outcome of the drama being played out in the Soviet Union. But it wouldn’t hurt to cross our fingers and join Ronald Reagan in wishing Gorbachev luck.