HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES : THE MAN WHO CHANGED THE WORLD : The Lives of Mikhail S. Gorbachev <i> By Gail Sheehy (Harper Collins: $22.95; 432 pp.) </i>

Mikhail Gorbachev arguably has changed the world more dramatically and with less bloodshed then any leader since Christ, and he certainly deserves something better than Gail Sheehy as a biographer. Hers is a pop-psychology genre of journalism in which the journalist’s own odyssey becomes the dominant subject and the historically important figure is reduced to reader bait for the purpose of sales.

The full-throated arrogance of this paltry effort is summarized by Sheehy’s boast that “this book is an X-ray of history--some of which I witnessed up close.” This from a writer with no knowledge of local languages, barely aware of regional history and who, after a few month-long visits, always accompanied by translators and government-supplied guides, considers herself a regular John Reed in the stormy streets of Petrograd.

What Sheehy has going for her is the strength of her naivete and a commercial hook in recycling the angle of her best-selling “Passages.” “I have been undertaking character studies of American and world leaders for many years,” she writes. But to know the stages in Gorbachev’s life, one has to know something about his country’s political history, of which Sheehy is abysmally ignorant.

As a result, the book exudes a breathy, frenetic tone as Sheehy follows one lead after another in her effort to get close to the subject. She never does. Despite (as she reveals in an unnecessary catalogue of her own work habits) getting up before 6 each morning to make calls to the Soviet Union and making frequent dashes after new leads on people who might have known the man himself, she apparently was never in his presence.

But she certainly tried, as she complains over and over. There was even a desperate plane ride back from Moscow to attend a dinner party with wealthy Mort Zuckerman during which she could meet what was to be her key high-placed Soviet contact “pooh-bah,” Nikolai Shishlin, a Communist Party Central Committee functionary.

She thinks Shishlin has promised her a Gorbachev interview. Welcome to the club. The list of journalists who think they were promised a Gorbachev interview by Shishlin just in the coffee shop of Washington’s Madison Hotel alone now runs in the hundreds. But none of the others have turned that failure of journalistic enterprise into a “character portrait” of Gorbachev.

The search for a journalistic coup then turns desperate. “I was the first print journalist to be taken to the actual site of Gorbachev’s childhood home,” Sheehy writes. But she doesn’t mean the first to visit the village where he grew up. There have been scores of other print and many more television-documentary accounts of this village and interviews with its inhabitants. Sheehy’s claimed coup is that she was the “first print reporter” to visit the “white hump of matted mud, dung and straw, with two or three little rooms inside” where Gorbachev was born. The only problem is that she never saw the hut because it’s been replaced by a hay field. Once again the exclusive experience is merely a shallow embellishment of journalistic failure.

The danger in this obsession is that information becomes misinformation because too much must be made of each anecdote or historical detail that comes to her attention. Gorbachev, too young to serve in the army, was left behind in an area overrun by the invading Nazis. This well-known fact is rendered as a dark secret by Sheehy to serve the purposes of a character passage: “Even today, members of his own ruling circle were stunned to learn that Gorbachev lived in an area occupied by the German forces.” Why stunned? Are members of his ruling circle incapable of reading a map and locating the much-publicized place of his childhood behind the well-marked line of the German advance? This is just silly.

The tour of Gorbachev’s life proceeds from the village to Moscow University and back to the village. Sheehy is apparently unaware that she herself was on a well-trodden tour. The Moscow University years once again are seen through the eyes of the group around Gorbachev who have by now told their stories to dozens of visitors, including this one. The stories have been told once too often, and the quotes are just a bit too polished. And Sheehy is biased in deciding which of those quotes to use.

It is important for Sheehy’s character portrait that Gorbachev be viewed early on as a tormented apparatchik torn between his need to get ahead and his awareness of the harshness of Stalin’s policies in his native region. But the two men who knew Gorbachev best back then, though only briefly quoted here, have gone on record with a different perspective. Vladimir Lieberman, a Jew, and Zdenek Mlynar, a Czech, both of whom suffered for their “foreign” origins, nonetheless recall the postwar formative years of Gorbachev as a time of idealism. Stalin, after all, had won the great patriotic war, the purges seemed to be of the ever-distant past and life was getting better materially, politically and culturally, at least in the eyes of the Moscow University elite.

Then came the “doctors’ plot” and the reappearance of virulent official anti-Semitism. Sheehy apparently is unaware that Mlynar (a Czech national tainted by the Prague purges) and Lieberman both were in trouble and both were defended by Gorbachev. This early resistance to Stalinism provided a basis for Gorbachev’s openness to Khrushchev and subsequent reform impulses. That at least is the view of his friends as reported in this newspaper and elsewhere.

But Lieberman and Mlynar are too serious for Sheehy’s purposes. In the end, she relies more on the chaotic, self-promoting Nadezhda Mikhailova who, I can attest from my own interviews with her, is eager to confirm any of a reporter’s prior impressions of Gorbachev as long as Nadezhda appears in the account. Nadezhda’s friends in the old-college-mate club are very quick to warn visitors about her tendency to self-aggrandizement. To mold the limited memories of this woman into the reflections of a central observer of Gorbachev’s life, as Sheehy does, is to make a mockery of reporting.

Invention is employed to substitute for genuine access or insight. The commonplace becomes mysterious and, in the throes of her enthnocentrism, her personal travails become a metaphor for a society with which she has had only the scantiest connection. How can any reporter visiting Moscow in March of this year write: “On a stopover in Frankfurt I scrambled to purchase a shortwave radio, in hopes of keeping in touch with the outside world. It felt like I was ‘going under.’ ” Why didn’t she purchase the International Herald Tribune, Time or Newsweek at her hotel, or get the excellent daily Los Angeles Times fax edition, or wander over to one of the news organizations to read their wires? For $25 a month, she could have joined the San Francisco-Moscow computer link-up and used their office in Moscow to send E-Mail, as scores of American business people and writers now do? Nor was it necessary to “scramble” in Frankfurt to buy a short-wave radio as if it were an illicit item in the Soviet Union, where such sets are present in the tens of millions. The purpose of her sentence is obviously to impart a sense of foreign intrigue to the mundane.

The last half of the book, after Sheehy runs out of anecdotes, reads like a computerized data-base search outlined with dinner-type one-liners. Yegor Ligachev and Boris Yeltsin appear as invented props for Gorbachev’s manipulation as if they did not represent real forces in the society. And the discussion of Gorbachev’s foreign policy degenerates into a romance novel revolving around his relationship with Margaret Thatcher, which is juiceless gossip. It all reads like filler. One does not need Gail Sheehy to write about arms control or SDI, and yet that is what she insists on doing without benefit of detectable knowledge or wisdom. What is all this doing here if not to pad an otherwise very thin account of Gorbachev the man?

The book doesn’t so much end as peter out with gloomy musings about the “Mafia cloud over Gorbachev,” which is a reference to the black market and the usual tales of how he goes abroad to recharge his spirits. She never does get her interview with Gorbachev, but “At the end of May, Alexander Yakovlev, his alter ego and closest adviser, made time to see me for a rare one-on-one interview.” Problem is, Yakovlev “had not once mentioned the name Gorbachev,” refusing pointedly to gossip about his colleague. As for a “rare” interview, Yakovlev has been interviewed, frequently, including twice by this paper and by New Perspective Quarterly, an L.A.-based journal of less than 1% of the circulation of Sheehy’s Vanity Fair.

Despite Sheehy’s negative spin, replete with dark references to the intense glare of his eyes and his messianic ability to lock in on people, this book still leaves one with a sense that Gorbachev is a helluva guy.

For example, we are treated to a full-blown exploration of the corrupt Brezhnev years, adorned with dancing ladies, Gypsy violinists and general alcoholic debauchery. But Sheehy in no way ties Gorbachev, the regional party boss, to any of that. On the contrary, Gorbachev is repeatedly exonerated of such behavior by the people who knew him.

Not satisfied, Sheehy writes: “Corrupt or not, the first secretary of a territory never had to worry about money,” a reference to available perks. But the issue was precisely “corrupt or not,” and if the evidence is that Gorbachev managed to retain his integrity in an enormous sea of corruption, isn’t that all the more impressive?

“By the standards of his world,” Sheehy nevertheless concedes, “Gorbachev seems to have been an honest apparatchik” who “went to some lengths to demonstrate that he was clean.” She recounts how he waited for a car for years on the same long list as everyone else, and even threw someone out of his office who offered a black-market one. Nor would he break even small rules to benefit his relatives and friends.

To resist the corruption that Sheehy describes as rampant would seem to demonstrate exemplary fortitude, and yet a disclaimer is supplied: “Gorbachev may have resisted taking bribes because he was playing an infinitely more sophisticated game where the stake was not money but power.” What a muddle, when she has just gone on so long about how money was power in the Brezhnev kingdom.

The disappointing thing about this book--for those who are looking for revealing deformities of character--is that Gorbachev emerges as an amazingly balanced and healthy product of a sick system. How that ever happened is a subject requiring the elucidation of an informed talent, which hopefully will be supplied in some other, more serious work.