THE WASHINGTON SUMMIT : Spinning His Homilies, Gorbachev Takes On a Professorial Air : Communicating: The Soviet leader can be long-winded. He uses metaphor, analogy, anecdotes and other podium devices to get his message across.

“Our ship has lost anchor and therefore we’re all a little sick,” Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev confided to American congressional leaders as they gathered around a long conference table in the Soviet Embassy on Friday.

“We have to turn around our brains, as it were, to adapt ourselves to this new kind of situation,” Gorbachev said of the upheavals wracking his homeland.

In a difficult hour, Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev has come to Washington in a didactic mood, intent on teaching Americans through homilies, metaphors, examples and anecdotes about the meaning of the turmoil in the Soviet Union.

His manner has made him seem more like a professor than a politician. And a rather long-winded one at that: For all his apparent mastery of modern public relations, he certainly does not speak in 30-second sound-bites. He prefers meandering 25-minute replies, brimming with history and philosophy and a little irony.

At no time during the first two days of his summit meetings with President Bush has Gorbachev’s mission to explain been more obvious than in his 90-minute session with the leaders of Congress.

Initially, Gorbachev said he might speak more frankly without the news media present.

“The press is still in the room, so maybe I am going to say more when the press is out of it,” he said.

But the Soviet leader never asked the press to leave nor the Cable News Network to turn off its cameras, and it was clear that he did not mind that his remarks might reach the American public as well as the American Congress.

Only the day before, Gorbachev had told a luncheon of American celebrities: “Like never before, we want to be understood right now.” His session with Senate and House leaders was surely a variation on the same theme.

Yet he did not sound like a pleader or a beggar. He sounded like a teacher trying to make complex and crucial points clear. As he told the congressional leaders: “You have to know what it’s all about in the Soviet Union and have to know it straight from the horse’s mouth.”

Gorbachev used several pedagogic techniques.

The most telling was probably analogy. The Soviet leader kept citing axioms of American political life to explain what goes on in the Kremlin. Pointing to Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), the powerful chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Gorbachev said that if the senator believed that an Administration policy would get the United States into difficulty, he would probably say: “Well, we will not adopt that in Congress. We will not approve that in my committee.”

“The same thing happens in the Kremlin,” Gorbachev said. “It’s really a mirror image now.”

The Soviet leader also complained about all the resolutions that Congress has voted in the past demanding changes in the Soviet Union.

“When we hear that there is a debate in the Congress about our affairs, about our legislation, about what we should do, well, that is resented in our society,” he said. “And you have to know that, because if we begin teaching you what to do in your Congress, then we’re in for trouble.”

Like a seasoned performer in the lecture hall, Gorbachev enjoyed expounding on questions that would lead to only one logical answer.

“Yesterday, let me tell you this, I talked to the President,” he said at one point, “and I said this: ‘We should decide what is important for both sides. Does the Soviet Union need an unstable America? An America in turmoil?

“ ‘Or vice versa? Does the United States want a Soviet Union that is weak, torn by complexes and problems and turmoil? Or do you want a dynamic Soviet state that is open to the outside world? I think that a realistically minded person can give only one answer.’ ”

The Soviet leader also had his metaphoric homilies, many sounding familiar to American ears: “Fishing in troubled waters,” he said, “ . . . is bad politics.”

Gorbachev also tried to drive political realities home to his political audience. The Soviet Union is in the process of transforming itself from an autocratic, Communist society into a more democratic, market society.

“We have to begin,” he said. “We have to begin this change of direction which is very dramatic, and some people are scared. People are scared about price increases. What can I say?”

And, in a moving repetition of phrases, reflecting the reality of two superpowers still armed with massive amounts of nuclear warheads, Gorbachev said: “Please don’t be frightened, because it can frighten us, too, if you get frightened.”

Gorbachev’s replies were so long--in the Russian manner--that only Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell of Maine, Senate Republican leader Bob Dole of Kansas, House Democratic Leader Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri and House Republican Leader Robert H. Michel of Illinois managed to slip in questions.

Afterward, Dole remarked that Gorbachev “does have long answers. He’d fit right in at the Senate.”

But it’s likely that a Senator Gorbachev might try the patience of many, even in the U.S. Senate.

Gorbachev, despite his didactic manner, recognized the limitations of a professor, even in dealing with his own people.

“We must do a great deal in order to turn around the mind and thinking of our people,” he said. “Lecturing alone will not suffice. We must involve them, really, in this process (of a market economy) for them to acquire the habits. We must change their way of life. But lecturing alone does not produce results.”

Gorbachev halted his lecturing long enough during the afternoon to receive awards from a procession of five organizations whose officials trooped into the Soviet Embassy. Much like a politician receiving honorary degrees, he looked grateful, pleased and, at times, a little embarrassed hearing the shower of praise. He even listened to song in his honor.

The Soviet leader received the $50,000 Albert Einstein Peace Prize that had once gone to the late Soviet civil rights advocate Andrei D. Sakharov, the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Freedom Medal for promoting the four freedoms (freedom of speech and religion, freedom from want and fear), the $1,000 Martin Luther King Jr. Non-Violent Peace Prize, the Man of History Award from the Appeal of Conscience Foundation and the Martin Luther King Jr. International Peace Award once won by former Costa Rican President and Nobel Peace laureate Oscar Arias Sanchez.

In the evening, at the White House ceremony in which he and President Bush signed arms control and other agreements, Gorbachev recognized that perhaps he had become too didactic and perhaps too long-winded. After his remarks, Gorbachev, who obviously had gone beyond his text, rapped his papers and apologized.

“I have already said more than I intended to say.”

But that was due, he explained, to his nature: he was “human and emotional.”