The Soviet Union’s Once and Future Gambler : GORBACHEV Heretic in the Kremlin <i> by Dusko Doder and Louise Branson (Viking: $24.95; 422 pp.)</i>

G lasnost has presented the Soviet public with much that is new and surprising, including the discovery that Western publishers react to new Soviet leaders by swift publication of their biographies. Soviet citizens were astounded to learn of the existence in the West of a number of detailed biographies of Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev and even Andropov.

It seemed even more astonishing that as long ago as 1986, at least four biographies of Gorbachev had been published. One of the results of these revelations was a flood of thousands of resentful letters to Soviet newspapers, magazines and publishers asking why the West could do what was not being done at home and Soviet citizens had to settle for just the 10-line blurb that was Gorbachev’s “official” party background. The public demanded the publication of a detailed, Russian-language biography.

In the fall of 1989, somewhere within the depths of the still-powerful apparatus that runs the official Soviet propaganda machine, a decision was reached: Gorbachev’s biography was to be published, and, to achieve maximum objectivity, it would be written by a Western author. Accredited Western journalists were given access to previously restricted archives of he school in the Krasnogvardeyskoe region where Gorbachev studied between 1944 and 1949. Interviews with former teachers and fellow students were permitted. Moscow University, which he attended from 1950 to 1955, also opened some of the records dealing with its famous graduate.

Privolnoe, the village where he was born and where he spent his childhood, had been off-limits to foreigners since 1985, but now temporary access was granted to Western correspondents. Soviet agencies trotted out and offered for publication old photographs: Gorbachev as a boy, a schoolchild, a university student, a bridegroom--with Raisa in 1954--and much more. Still, not one Western book or article dealing with Gorbachev’s past was translated into Russian and published, for this couldn’t be done without permission by Gorbachev himself.

The new Gorbachev biography by Dusko Doder and Louise Branson was completed for publication in June, 1990, coinciding with Gorbachev’s visit to Washington. This book probably is the most likely to be available in a possibly somewhat condensed Russian-language edition not only because Gorbachev is presented here in a very positive light but, more important, because the authors know Kremlin politics better than any of the previous biographers. Both authors were Moscow correspondents during the critical period after Leonid Brezhnev’s death, when, after the two brief periods of the Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko administrations, the throne of the Soviet Communist empire passed to Gorbachev. At the time, his ascent was greeted with practically unanimous and enthusiastic approval in the Soviet Union and abroad.

Gorbachev is unique among the Russian leaders who preceded him--Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko--for having done much for the sake of people rather than of utopian ideas. At the same time, he is the only ruler who was jeered by the thousands of Muscovites who came out on May Day to turn the socialist holiday into an anti-government demonstration, and who forced Gorbachev precipitously to leave the sacred podium atop Lenin’s tomb.

The Western perception of Gorbachev is that of a man who succeeded in accomplishing the impossible. He ended the Cold War, dismantled the Iron Curtain and terminated the era of ideological confrontation that began in 1917. For much of the Soviet population and leadership, however, these developments do not represent a victory of perestroika , but rather capitulation and surrender to capitalism.

Gorbachev has become not only the most popular but also the best- known leader in the world. In 1989, Time magazine, having once previously made him its Man of the Year, honored him a second time with the title of Man of the Decade. At the same time, as Doder and Branson properly note, Gorbachev’s popularity in the Soviet Union has drastically decreased. Gorbachev was the only candidate for President in the election in the spring of 1990; had there been other contenders, most probably he would have lost to the president-elect of the Russian Republic, Boris Yeltsin.

This biography, as well as the other Gorbachev biographies, is more than a traditional biography of a leader; it is the human history of perestroika , a process that Gorbachev began. On the personal level, the authors add little to what limited information was available prior to 1985. Searching for something new, they “discover” an older brother who died during the war, at the battle of Kursk in 1943.

However, since Gorbachev’s mother, Maria Panteleevna, was born in 1912, and the 1943 army draft applied to young men born in 1925 (this was my generation), it is quite obvious that there could be no older brother who had died in the war--he would have had to be born to a 13-year-old mother. (The authors base this report on a conversation with an unidentified “senior official” who said Gorbachev, at a Politburo meeting devoted to the issue of veterans’ benefits, mentioned that his older brother was killed in the battle of Kursk.”)

The authors challenge the suggestion in official Soviet biography and elsewhere that Gorbachev’s father was a Communist Party member. They contend--citing another “senior Soviet official”--that grandfather Andrei was arrested in 1931 and served nine years in the Gulag. This, they say, profoundly influenced young Mikhail and even might have had a bearing on his eventual choice of profession.

Whatever grandfather Andrei’s later fate, there is, in my opinion, no doubt about his having been a local activist and chairman of a kolkhoz (collective). At the same time, while Doder and Branson say that Gorbachev’s maternal grandfather, Panteley (“whose family name has never been disclosed”) “was the first chairman of a collective farm in the area,” there seems to be very little information, official or unofficial, about Panteley or most of Gorbachev’s other maternal relatives. This might be an indication that they were the ones caught in the wave of Stalinist persecution that decimated Soviet peasantry in 1929-1932.

In 1985, Gorbachev was a leader without any remarkable accomplishments to his credit when, after a long and difficult struggle behind the scenes, he was anointed by the party bosses. At the age of 54, having gradually risen within the party apparatus from a beginning as a youth organizer at Moscow University to the very top as general secretary of the Communist Party, Gorbachev had not done or said anything that could have differentiated him from the rest of his party colleagues and rivals. He was younger and had both charisma and intellect, but Soviet agriculture, which was his responsibility in Stavropol prior to 1978, and in the Politburo until 1985, was heading for disaster, and only massive imports of food saved the country from starvation.

It is easy to understand the impatience of people who are fed up with shortages and long lines. They forget, however, that in 1985, at the outset of perestroika , Gorbachev was forced to work with the aging, inept Brezhnev team--Viktor Grishin, Grigori Romanov, Dinmukhamed Kunaiev, Vladimir Shcherbitsky, Geidar Aliev, Nikolai Tikhonov, Andrei Gromyko. Even the new Gorbachev team that accompanied him to the seats of power hardly was liberal.

The stability of the empire, ruled by a military and party coalition from Moscow, was based on fear, and the three main underpinnings, as pointed out by the authors of the book, were ideology, the army and the KGB. All three were under the control of conservatives--Yegor Ligachev, Sergei Sokolov and Viktor Chebrikov.

It always was expected of a Soviet leader that he would not hesitate to use force, anywhere within the empire, to defeat any real threat to the Communist dictatorship. A leader could be a tyrant like Stalin, a liberal like Khrushchev or a self-important blow-hard like Brezhnev, but in every case, he had to be surrounded by an aura of greatness and, most important, he had to be merciless in destroying enemies of the party and ideological adversaries. Gorbachev did not have this ruthless streak; he was not ready to destroy those who opposed official doctrine. This peculiarity of Soviet society is perfectly understood and described in the book:

A military empire like the Soviet Union functions adequately as long as the towering magnificence of its leader is coupled with his stiff resolve to uphold the order. But Gorbachev’s main objective was to dismantle the hierarchical military society at home and abandon the costly, expansionist, grand-style imperialism abroad.

If Gorbachev had attempted to pursue these goals in 1985, he would not have been able to stay in power for more than a few weeks. The next plenum of the Central Committee would have removed him and replaced him with Ligachev. This scenario was a possibility almost to the end of 1989. It was only the incipient dissolution of the empire and the loss of power by Communist parties in East Germany, Poland, Hungary, Romania and Czechoslovakia that left the Soviet Union with no other alternative than to initiate fundamental economic reforms and to abandon the one-party system.

This new reality deprives the conservative wing of the party of hope for the future. However, Gorbachev himself also will be endangered if he should fail to solve the problems that have been created by the nationalist and separatist forces that threaten the very existence of the Soviet Union as a viable entity.

The principal advantage of Doder and Branson’s book, when compared to other books on Gorbachev and perestroika , is that the many years that the authors spent in the Soviet Union, and their command of the Russian language, have enabled them not only to understand the intricacies of the Kremlin’s intramural politics and the many varied aspects of Soviet society as a whole, but also to appreciate the characteristics of the Russian people shaped by centuries of history, and the role of the intelligentsia in a society that has never known democracy.

They not only recount in detail the uninterrupted struggle for power that resulted in a Gorbachev presidency and has accorded him a measure of constitutional authority that is greater than that held by any previous Soviet leader, but they also describe the slow popular awakening, primarily in urban areas, of a people who had been terrified and oppressed, deceived by official propaganda and corrupted by a government that tried to provide for the material good of the society not by stressing individual initiative, resourcefulness and talent but by wasting irreplaceable natural resources and ruthlessly exploiting the peasantry.

Sharply lower crude-oil prices, the Chernobyl disaster and the depopulation of rural areas (thousands of villages deserted as young people leave for the cities) had a depressing effect on the Soviet masses. With the exception of the war and victory over Germany in 1945, there remained little reason for national pride. The promised communist paradise had disappeared, and there was little to look forward to other than hard work, rising prices and mutual recriminations.

Perestroika, first and foremost, is now the restoration of what had been destroyed. Glasnost has become primarily the disclosure of past crimes. When Gorbachev advanced his arguments for intensifying glasnost in 1986, “none of his key associates anticipated its eventual impact; nor, probably, did he.” This observation by the authors is quite correct; perestroika had no master plan; it developed its own momentum; it moved rapidly and unpredictably. Its main impetus came from Gorbachev himself and his extraordinary political dynamism, his creative ability, his convictions, the strength of his personality and his willingness to modify and compromise, which is brilliantly illustrated by Doder and Branson.

But, after having achieved supreme power in a society that is slowly developing genuine democratic structures, at a time when strong nationalist tendencies are tearing apart the historical Russian empire and destabilizing the national economy, Gorbachev now is faced with two equally unattractive alternatives: to be swept away by increasing anarchy or to transform emerging democracy into a dictatorship.

Gorbachev’s rescue from either of these two destructive possibilities is in the hands of the United States and Western Europe. The Soviet Union as a liberal, democratic and socialist country is much to be preferred to one that is in the throes of a civil war and economic blockades caused by an explosive mix of mutually inimical and destructive ethnic and religious groupings.