SHEEHY vs. SCHEER

I write as an author who was savaged by Robert Scheer in your Dec. 16 book review of my biography, “The Man Who Changed the World: The Lives of Mikhail S. Gorbachev.”

Scheer has already expressed in public his distaste for my journalistic technique, that is, using character analysis of a leader as a means of interpreting and predicting political history. Scheer has every right to express his own bias and to disagree with my book’s conclusions. He does not have the right to misrepresent the work of a peer in order to aggrandize his own reporting. His was a blatantly dishonest review that misrepresents my journalistic practices and accuses me of things I never did. Here are only three of the more egregious examples:

He states: “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 The only problem is that she never saw the hut because it’s been replaced by a hay field.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 book clearly states: “After much persuasion I was the first print journalist to be taken to the actual site of Gorbachev’s childhood home. A white hump of matted mud, dung, and straw, with two or three little rooms inside, the Gorbachev hut once crouched across a dirt road . . . Today the huts are gone.” This is hardly an attempt to mislead the reader; nor is it in any way a journalistic failure, since I was able to find and have an exclusive interview with the woman who lived next door to Gorbachev growing up, as well as a dozen other comrades and relations.

Scheer ridicules my reporting that even members of Gorbachev’s own ruling circle were stunned to learn that he lived in an area occupied by the German forces. Why couldn’t they see on a map that “the much-publicized place of his childhood” was behind German lines? he demands, adding “This is just silly.” It’s as “silly” as the fact that Soviets were the only people in the world who didn’t know about Stalin’s secret pact with Hitler until the protocols were finally published in the Soviet press in 1988. The truth is, top functionaries in Moscow’s National Press Center told me that 70% of the biographical material in my original Vanity Fair article was new to them.

Scheer states that the two men who knew Gorbachev best in his university days, Vladimir Lieberman and Zdenek Mlynar, are “only briefly quoted here” and “are too serious for Sheehy’s purposes,” which, he states, “make a mockery of reporting.”

In fact, I had many hours of interviews with both men. A glance at the index will show that Mlynar is quoted on pages 66, 67, 72-76, 78, 79, 81, 83, 84, 97, 100-101, 108, 205, 271, 337, 351, 352. Lieberman is also quoted on 20 pages. (Altogether I interviewed 102 Soviets and more than 50 American and European experts with personal knowledge of Gorbachev.)

Scheer falsely accuses me of being “apparently unaware that Mlynar and Lieberman . . . both were in trouble and both were defended by Gorbachev” during the period of official anti-Semitism and the “doctor’s plot,” and goes on to pat himself on the back for reporting this evidence of Gorbachev’s early resistance to Stalinism. In truth, the book has a vivid account of Gorbachev’s defense of Lieberman, and many other scenes of his “double life” as a hard-line Komsomol leader by day, with probable connections to the KGB, and a “secret doubter” by night behind dormitory doors who engaged in dangerous debates about Stalinism.

So busy is he trying to discredit me as a worthy journalist because I didn’t do my time as a daily correspondent in Moscow, as he did, Scheer never even mentions my central thesis. Whatever my limitations as a journalist operating in a still highly controlled Communist country with the KGB always on my trail, I came out with an insight into the character of Gorbachev to which the last hundred pages of the book is devoted: his transformation into a “dictator for democracy,” which raised the question “Was Gorbachev, like most Russian reformers before him, turning from a reformer into a repressor?” A man of the integrity of Eduard Shevardnadze raised the same dark questions and shocked the world with his resignation--several months after I had written that conclusion.

Scheer wrote that “The book doesn’t so much end as peter out with gloomy musings . . . “ In fact, the epilogue could hardly be more explicit, closing with this paragraph:

“And yet, just as he had lived his life in doublethink, he probably would be remembered after his political death in riddles of contradiction: Mikhail Gorbachev--the last romantic communist, who put communism on the trash heap of history. Mikhail Gorbachev--the man who changed the world but lost his country.”

GAIL SHEEHY, NEW YORK CITY