Fine Art of Watching Gorbachev

Even the most established Soviet experts tend to have tarnished credentials these days, because they could not tell five years ago where Mikhail S. Gorbachev was coming from or where he was going. But amateurs, as we now see, are no great improvement--even if on Tuesday they did perform a service of sorts for the world.

The amateurs not only measured the incredibly long shadow that the Soviet president has come to cast over the West but they also demonstrated that nowadays the merest rumor that Gorbachev has sneezed can make otherwise sensible nations reach for their fever thermometers.

For decades the world was carefully taught that Moscow’s Communists were so brutal and bull-headed that anyone who wanted to reform the party would have to shoot his way into it. That was not quite true. But even today, the word miracle is the only way that one of the better Soviet experts in America can explain how Gorbachev made it to the top of his party’s apparatus where he could reach up and tug at the thread that may cause communism to unravel.

True to form, many of the same experts who failed to predict the advent of Gorbachev have spent most of the years since he took office predicting that reforming the Soviet economy andthe Soviet society were both impossible and that he would soon be on his way either to retirement or to some leaf-raking position in Siberia.

The Cable News Network, which arrived on the scene just a few years before Gorbachev, has played an important part in the use of television to teach people the world over not to believe everything they hear about Moscow. It helped that viewers could not only hear about Gorbachev but also see him doing things that the experts said could not be done. It also helped in recent months that they could see the people of East Germany peacefully dismantling a Communist government that the experts said could only be removed by force.

Perhaps it is not surprising that the same CNN showed the people of the West on Tuesday how much they now depend on Gorbachev to outline a future over which he actually has little or no control. CNN’s report that Gorbachev might resign as Communist Party leader caused what the Wall Street Journal called a “frantic” scramble to buy American dollars and sell German marks. The White House also scrambled to find the meaning of it all. It is a useful reminder of the frailty of expertise, even among able amateurs.