Mikhail Gorbachev

Mikhail Gorbachev would like to absolve himself from blame for any of the turbulence and calamities besetting the former Soviet Union, as he attemempts to do in his article in the New Perspectives Quarterly (Commentary, Dec. 20).

Gorbachev castigates Vladimir V. Zhirinovskyle for his far-right views, and blames the current Yeltsin government for not producing “a smooth development of reforms . . . turning us into paupers, leaving us to the mercy of corrupted profiteers, Mafia and criminals.” Nowhere does he reprove his own culpability in this sordid process.

Innocently, stated without reproach he writes, “Do not get me wrong . . . I consider myself a part of the democratic fold. I stand for maintaining the reforms and going forward with them.” Standing above the fray, Gorbachev ignores his role in introducing perestroika and glasnost, the supposed panacea for removing the Soviet Union from its socialist base into the “democratic fold,” namely a free market economy. As a prime architect for the new free enterprise building, he ignores the blueprint he helped design, which is now an edifice, crumbling and buckling.

Gorbachev should seriously look deeply into his own flawed behavior that preceded and led up to the Yeltsin takeover of the government.

Gorbachev’s failure to enjoin the people when he was chairman of the Communist Party to use the office to challenge Yeltsin’s free market forces by rallying the unions, the party and those ready to struggle for maintaining socialism will course through his veins, until he comes to grips with his own complicity in the “crazy dissolution of the Soviet Union.”

JERRY ATINSKY

Los Angeles