Reagan Urges ‘Risk’ on Gorbachev : Soviet Leader May Be Only Hope for Change, He Says

Ronald Reagan said today that Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev is possibly his country’s only hope for change, and “we should take the risk” of believing that he is serious about arms control.

Of China, the former President said: “The Chinese government hasn’t learned something very elementary: You can’t massacre an idea. You cannot run tanks over hope. You cannot riddle a people’s yearning with bullets.”

Reagan was addressing the English Speaking Union in the Guildhall, the 1,000-year-old seat of London city government, where he spoke as President 13 months ago and where Gorbachev gave a speech in April.

‘Goliath of Totalitarianism’

Reagan, on his first visit to Britain since leaving the White House, mixed jokes and reminiscences with a sweeping vision of a world where “the Goliath of totalitarian control will rapidly be brought down by the David of the microchip.”

“I believe Mikhail Gorbachev realizes these things,” Reagan said.

“I believe Mikhail Gorbachev is the Soviets’ best and probably only hope to turn things around.

“It is true that the West could stand pat while this is happening. We are not the ones who must change. It is not our people who’re isolated from the information that allows them to be creative and productive,” he said.

“But it is exactly when you are strong and comfortable that you should take risks.”

He said: “I believe we should take the risk that the Soviets are serious in their efforts to reach genuine arms reductions with the West. I support President Bush’s proposal to keep pressure on the Soviets to make good on their calls to reduce arms.

‘Increasingly Helpless’

“The biggest of Big Brothers is increasingly helpless against communications technology,” he said.

“Information is the oxygen of the modern age. . . . It seeps through the walls topped with barbed wire. It wafts across the electrified, booby-trapped borders. Breezes of electronic beams blow through the Iron Curtain as if it was lace.”

He said that as long as the Soviets restricted the flow by such measures as banning the unauthorized use of photocopiers, the West should go on refusing to sell the Soviets modern computers.

“When the Soviets are willing to allow their own people to have computers and telephones and copiers and the other devices of information, then we should rethink our objections to what we’ll sell them,” Reagan said.

‘Spirit of Democracy’

“Amazing things are afoot in the world this spring,” he said.

Poland had held its first semi-free election in 40 years; Hungary was moving to multiparty democracy; Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov sat in Parliament, and in China, “those heroic Chinese students who gave their lives have released the spirit of democracy and it cannot be called back,” Reagan said.

Answering a reporter’s question about China as he left the Guildhall, Reagan said: “I think the students were right and we should do everything we can to help.”