Mikhail Gorbachev

The interview with Mikhail S. Gorbachev (World Report, Nov. 1) struck a note of irony. Celebrated for his openness and candor, Gorbachev has yet to demonstrate that candor when it comes to a key historical reality: Communism was unreformable. Perestroika amounted to mere tinkering with a system which was, at its root, rotten. This explains why the Eastern European dictators dropped off their high places like ripe fruit once Moscow let it be known that it would no longer use troops to protect those regimes from their own people.

But why was communism unreformable? Because as a relic of the old industrial era it ran up against the new era of the computer and communications. Mind control from the Kremlin would no longer work--not even at the end of the barrel of a gun.

But for Gorbachev to admit as much would pry open a Pandora’s box of even more hard-to-face questions such as: “Was communism a grave error from the beginning?” And so long as he spends time looking back at might-have-beens, how about this one: a 20th Century minus the bloody tyranny, economic backwardness and ecological disaster of communism.

CHARLES WELLING

Newport Beach