Gorbachev Wins Nobel Peace Prize : Award: Soviet leader cited for helping end Cold War and forging change in Europe. Bush lauds the decision.

Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on Monday for his role in ending the Cold War, bringing historic changes to Europe and promoting international disarmament.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee, announcing the 1990 Peace Prize in Oslo, praised Gorbachev for “his leading role in the peace process which today characterizes important parts of the international community.”

Gorbachev’s contributions to world peace in the five years that he has led the Soviet Union have been “many and decisive,” the committee said. It cited the dramatic rapprochement between East and West, the democratization of Eastern Europe, the resolution of a number of regional conflicts and major moves toward disarmament.

Although Gorbachev has already received many peace prizes and been credited widely with the growing international detente, the Nobel award recognizes the historic nature of the changes now under way and the unique role that Gorbachev has played in this reshaping of world politics.

“In the opinion of the committee,” the citation said, “this peace process, which Gorbachev has contributed so significantly to, opens up new possibilities for the world community to solve its pressing problems across ideological, religious, historical and cultural dividing lines.”

The committee also lauded Gorbachev for “the greater openness he has brought about in Soviet society,” noting that the country’s democratization is reducing suspicion of the Soviet Union and its intentions and thus strengthening international trust.

Further tributes to the 59-year-old Soviet leader came from the leaders of Britain, Germany, France, Japan, Czechoslovakia and Poland, while in Washington, President Bush described Gorbachev as “a courageous force for peace in the world.”

On the streets of Moscow, however, the reaction was mixed. While many people agreed that Gorbachev has earned the prize for his efforts to reduce international tensions, more said he must concentrate his attention on the country’s crumbling economy, growing separatism and rising social unrest.

Gorbachev said the prize recognizes the importance of perestroika, as his reform program is known, in bringing a far-reaching realignment in world politics.

“Words fail one at such moments,” Gorbachev said in an interview shown on Soviet television. “As a human being, I am deeply moved and excited by this decision, and I would not hide it.

“But I perceive this action by a most prestigious organization not in personal terms but as recognition of the significance for the destiny of the whole world of the immense cause that we call perestroika. “

In foreign policy, perestroika has meant an unprecedented willingness in Moscow to rethink almost every position, ranging from the old Soviet strategic goal of parity with the United States, to the need for a protective chain of satellites in Eastern Europe, to its desire to promote the cause of socialism wherever it could in the Third World.

Soviet strategic thinking is now based on “sufficient defense” and mutual security based on “a balance of interests,” concepts that have enabled Moscow to make far-reaching concessions in disarmament talks in the belief that political agreements provide greater security than military might--and are notably less expensive.

Gorbachev permitted the countries of Eastern Europe to break with Moscow and in almost every case actively promoted their democratization at key junctures to ensure the success of those movements, whatever the cost to the Soviet Union itself.

And “common human values,” which are felt to unite people, replaced Moscow’s belief in traditional class struggle and its commitment to promoting revolution worldwide.

Describing his approach as “new political thinking,” Gorbachev proceeded on the basis that the Soviet Union would have true security only when other nations--notably, the United States, as its principal rival--felt secure enough to dispense with the determination to maintain military superiority.

He also found, again largely through tough negotiations with Washington and its allies in NATO, that timely concessions, sometimes made unilaterally, helped win the trust necessary for major steps in disarmament.

Soviet and U.S. negotiators are completing a treaty that will reduce the two superpowers’ nuclear arsenals by more than a third, and teams from NATO and the Warsaw Pact expect to conclude another agreement shortly that will reduce conventional forces in Europe.

“I think that perestroika and our new thinking met such solidarity and received such unexpectedly strong support because the world was ripe for a change,” Gorbachev said, explaining the impact of his foreign policy.

“The world was tired of the Cold War and the arms race and all those hardships connected with it. It needed a new policy, new goals, a new course, and I think this is the main thing,” he added.

In its citation, the Nobel Committee said: “During the last few years, dramatic changes have taken place in the relationship between East and West. Confrontation has been replaced by negotiations. Old European nations have regained their freedom. The arms race is slowing down, and we see a definite and active process in the direction of arms control and disarmament.

“Several regional conflicts have been solved, or have at least come closer to a solution. The United Nations is beginning to play the role which was originally planned for it in an international community governed by law.

“These historic changes spring from several factors,” the citation said, “but in 1990 the Nobel Committee wants to honor Mikhail Gorbachev for his many and decisive contributions.”

Nothing was more stunning, however, than the equanimity with which the Soviet Union under Gorbachev accepted the transformation of Eastern Europe last year from satellite states of a latter-day empire into budding new democracies, which immediately asked Soviet forces to leave and signaled their intention to quit the Warsaw Pact and Comecon, the Communist trading bloc.

Having declared at the United Nations in December, 1988, that “freedom of choice is a universal principle,” Gorbachev contained political protests at home as one country after another chose to go its own way. He then personally intervened in the negotiations that brought Germany’s reunification after originally arguing that the question would have to be left to future generations.

The roots of this policy change were, first of all, domestic. Gorbachev realized, even before he assumed the Soviet leadership in early 1985, that the quest for military parity with the United States was bankrupting the country and leaving it even weaker than if it had not tried to compete.

The other costs of global reach, whether assistance to friendly Third World regimes or the projection of military power across the Eurasian land mass, also were too heavy for the weakened economy.

The division of Europe into armed camps, further, meant that the Soviet Union would be frozen out as the Continent’s strongest economies unified into a huge new marketplace.

For all his stature abroad, however, Gorbachev seems, paradoxically but increasingly, in danger of falling behind the movements that he set in motion here--the end of the Communist Party’s monopoly on power, the remaking of the Soviet Union as a federal state and the difficult development of a market economy.

Despite the achievements of perestroika, he is facing a deeper crisis--and not just one but a series--that he did a year ago as a volatile mix of anger and angst threaten the country with social unrest.

And Gorbachev, faced with this growing criticism, particularly over his indecisive handling of economic reform, was clearly buoyed by the Nobel award.

“This action inspires us,” he said in an interview broadcast on Soviet television. “It nourishes my position, my mood and my condition intellectually, emotionally and physically, and it strengthens my conviction that we are on the right road.”

Gorbachev was selected by the five-member Nobel Committee from among 100 nominees for the annual award. He will receive the prize, which brings with its prestige a cash award of more than $700,000, on Dec. 10 in Oslo, the Norwegian capital.

The other leading candidates were Nelson Mandela, the deputy president of the African National Congress of South Africa, President Vaclav Havel of Czechoslovakia and Chai Ling, a leader of the Chinese pro-democracy movement.

NOBEL PEACE PRIZE WINNERS SINCE 1970 1990 Mikhail Gorbachev, president of the Soviet Union and instrumental figure in movement to greater freedom throughout Eastern Europe. 1989: The Dalai Lama, exiled spiritual and political leader of Tibet. 1988: The United Nations Peacekeeping Forces. 1987 Oscar Arias Sanchez, president of Costa Rica, and author of a Central American peace plan. 1986: Elie Wiesel, American writer, human rights activist and chairman of the U.S. President’s Commission on the Holocaust. 1985: International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, a Boston, Mass.-based organization headed by Soviet and an American doctors. 1984: Anglican Bishop Desmond Tutu, South African anti-apartheid activist. 1983: Lech Walesa, Poland, leader of the Solidarity trade union. 1982: Alva Myrdal, Sweden, and Alfonso Garcia Robles, Mexico, diplomats and campaigners for disarmament. 1981: Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. 1980: Adolfo Perez Esquivel, Argentina, architect, sculptor and human rights activist. 1979: Mother Teresa, leader of the Missionaries of Charities, Calcutta, India. 1978: Anwar Sadat, president of Egypt, and Menachem Begin, prime minister of Israel, who negotiated the Israeli-Egyptian peace accord. 1977: Amnesty International, London-based human rights organization. 1976: Betty Williams and Mairead Corrigan, founders of the Northern Ireland Peace Movement, later renamed Community of Peace People. 1975: Andrei Sakharov, Soviet nuclear physicist, human rights and peace activist. 1974: Sean MacBride of Ireland, United Nations commissioner for Namibia, and former Japanese Prime Minister Eisaku Sato, who campaigned against nuclear weapons. 1973: Henry A. Kissinger, U.S. secretary of state, and North Vietnamese Foreign Minister Le Duc Tho, who negotiated the Vietnam cease-fire agreement. Tho declined the prize. 1972: No prize. 1971: Willy Brandt, West German chancellor and leading champion of East-West detente. 1970: Norman Ernest Borlaug, American developer of high-yield grains credited with helping to alleviate world hunger.