One for the Book: Was It His Mother or Mitterrand?

The question that is puzzling and delighting France is: Whom did Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev really write about in his latest book, his mother or French President Francois Mitterrand?

According to the French publisher of Gorbachev’s new book detailing the attempted coup in the Soviet Union, the book includes a line complaining how Mitterrand failed to phone Gorbachev in the hours after the Soviet leader was released from custody by the conspirators.

“From Foros (in the Crimea), I had a conversation with President Bush,” Gorbachev writes in the version published in Paris by Olivier Orban Editions. “Francois Mitterrand ought to have called me. He didn’t do it and I regret it to this day.” The same line is in the Italian and Finnish editions.

But in successive press conferences in France, where he stayed Wednesday night at Mitterrand’s Basque country cottage near Biarritz, Gorbachev denied he wrote the lines about the French president. He suggested that the lines may have been inserted in his book as part of a political plot to embarrass Mitterrand.

“If there is something like that in my book,” he said on French television Wednesday night, “it’s not from me. It’s not my book.

“You have to ask yourselves,” Gorbachev told journalists here Thursday, “who would profit from this?”

According to a report in the Independent, a British newspaper, Gorbachev was paid $500,000 by the British-American publisher Harper Collins for rights to his book, “The August Coup” in English and “Le Putsch” in French.

In the British-American editions, the Mitterrand line is mysteriously missing. In its place are harmless sentences in which Gorbachev regrets not being able to call his mother immediately after his release.

“From Foros, I also had a conversation with President Bush,” Gorbachev writes in the British-American version. “I ought to have telephoned my mother. But I was unable to do it. I still regret that.”

French publisher Olivier Orban claims that his version, avec Mitterrand , is the correct one, approved and initialed after several readings in Russian by Gorbachev. The book was translated from Russian into French in Paris. Orban claims that Mitterrand was excised at the last minute from the British version by a nervous Soviet official, who then added the lines about Gorbachev’s mother.

Mitterrand has tried to dismiss the tale of two texts by claiming that it is the product of internal French politics.

Besides, he said, he tried to call his pal Gorbachev but it was just “bad luck” that President Bush got through first.

Before the latest flap about the book, Mitterrand was already under political attack in France for being slow to condemn the coup when it first occurred.