COLUMN LEFT : What Hero Would Destroy His Nation? : The paeans to Gorbachev ignore his economic failure.

It was clear back in August, in the wake of the abortive putsch, that the Soviet Union was done for. It was clear, too, that Mikhail S. Gorbachev was finished. As the Soviet state withered away, his last and most fervent supporters turned out to be the Western banks that saw him as the vested representative of a Union that owed them about $100 billion.

Today, in the twilight of his political career, Gorbachev presents a pathetic spectacle, ceaselessly prophesying the disasters for which he himself bears so heavy a responsibility. But a scant four years ago he was the most admired leader on the planet, hailed in the West as a man leading the Soviet Union out of totalitarian darkness. To criticize Gorbachev was to stand indicted of enmity to glasnost and to the spirit of reform.

My first doubts about Gorbachev came in about 1986, when my brother Patrick, at that time Moscow correspondent of the London Financial Times, remarked to me that Gorbachev reminded him of Harold Wilson.

It was a troubling parallel. Wilson was the British Labor Party leader who swept into power in the early 1960s after nearly a decade and a half of Tory rule. He was long on techno-modernist rhetoric and spoke endlessly about the “white heat” of technological revolution. He was the sworn enemy of outdated thinking.

Like Gorbachev, Wilson turned out to be short on substantive achievement. He was a manipulator, not a strategist. He seemed to have no vision beyond the next parliamentary crisis or the next session with the IMF. Gorbachev, zigzagging his way across the political spectrum, never happier than when gabbing about the cradle of European civilization west of the Urals, had a lot of Wilson in him.

Then Pierre Sprey, the weapons designer and military analyst, said to me that the language of economic perestroika put forth by Gorbachev and his crowd put him in mind of the Robert McNamara whiz kids who took over the Defense Department in the Kennedy Administration. Then, too, there was much talk about “modern methods,” systems analysis and so forth. Old salts who knew how to make things work were shunted aside. In short order, things worked a lot less well than before, at three times the cost.

The final straw for me was the ban on vodka. At a single stroke, Gorbachev surrendered one of the main sources of revenue for the state and conjured a vast Mafia into being. Meanwhile, since Gorbachev had failed to do anything to improve economic consumption, people sought drink more than ever.

I remember meeting a Gorby-type called Sergei Plekhanov who was visiting Los Angeles not long after the vodka ban. Young Plekhanov talked smoothly about the need for “de-ideologization” of Soviet foreign policy and I remember feeling stunned at the spectacle of this supposedly smart fellow--part of Georgy Arbatov’s United States of America and Canada Institute--displaying no visible sign of knowing what the world was all about.

The usual defense of Gorbachev at this point in the discussion is that nothing can detract from his central achievement: glasnost and genuine elections. And, though he fought hard in the other direction, Gorbachev recognized the validity of the old Leninist promise, that any republic in the Soviet Union had the right to secede.

Of course it is good that there is a certain democracy, freedom of speech and opinion. But much of this occurred independent of Gorbachev and at a velocity that discomfited him. And as John Kenneth Galbraith pointed out to the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee in a speech the other day, in the end the four freedoms depend upon freedom from economic duress.

Roy Medvedev, the Soviet historian who did time in prison as a dissident in the Brezhnev years, points out in New Left Review that “in the Soviet Union today, no one lives better than they did 10 years ago, if we discount the 2% or 3% of the population who are growing rich on speculation.”

The political and monetary system has disintegrated, productivity plunged, agriculture deteriorated and the best-seller lists become populated by mysticism and pornography. The Communist Party is banned, scarcely an advertisement for the triumph of democracy.

“I think it will be possible,” Medvedev concluded, “that the evaluation we make (of Gorbachev) will be a very harsh one. I wouldn’t exclude the possibility that we will decide that Gorbachev was the person who destroyed the country.” Today, with the Soviet Union gone, virulent and racist nationalisms burgeoning and allies like Cuba betrayed in the hope of dollars from Washington, that does not seem too savage a judgment.