COMMUNISM: R.I.P. : MEMOIRS.<i> By Mikhail Gorbachev (Doubleday: $35, 769 pp.)</i>

Mikhail Gorbachev is Russia’s invisible man. Yet just a decade ago, he was everywhere to be seen, widely regarded (especially by the West) as the Soviet Union’s savior, still a true believer in the utopian ideals of Lenin. He steadfastly held that a purer, more just system, faithful to the socialist project of its Bolshevik founders, was somehow waiting to be reborn if only the deforming legacy of Stalin could be banished.

In a way, Gorbachev set out to save communism from itself--to strike a “New Deal” in order to curb its worst excesses. His reforms of the late 1980s, however, ended in both the collapse of the Soviet Union and his political career.

In a recent conversation with David Remnick, author of “Lenin’s Tomb,” Gorbachev made a startling admission while in New York promoting “Memoirs.” “Cruelty,” he said, “was the main problem with Lenin.” Gorbachev added that “the main mistake of the Bolsheviks was that their violent emergency measures and methods were not temporary at all but were instituted for decades. The rather artificial model created by Marx, which was made even more utopian by what the Bolsheviks added to it--that model was imposed by force, and that model did violence to the human being, to the human conscience, to his beliefs, his initiative, his economic sense. It was diktat, all of it!” More startling is that he has made other recent statements presenting the opposite view--that he doesn’t fully believe the Leninist dream was a nightmare from the start. It is clear that Gorbachev cannot quite make up his mind.

This past summer Gorbachev sought to revive his fortunes by running for Russian president. He received barely one half of 1% of the popular vote. Police escorts and reporters frequently outnumbered voters at campaign appearances. How is it possible that this same man--the unwitting liberator of the Soviet people from totalitarian rule, Nobel Peace Prize winner and darling of the Western world--has found himself so isolated, indeed despised, among his own countrymen?

Gorbachev’s “Memoirs” provides a good answer, which is all the more persuasive because it is quite unintentional. In almost 700 pages, the former Soviet president attempts to explain and to justify his six-year saga in office. What he produces instead is an inadvertent self-indictment.

One must give Gorbachev credit for his honesty. Very little in his memoirs factually contradicts the numerous other available accounts. Also, one cannot but be impressed with the former Soviet leader’s good intentions--with how much he wanted to see his country moving again, how eager he was to bring basic freedom and dignity to Soviet life and how extremely reluctant he was to use force in even the direst of circumstances. After 70 years of a brutal dictatorship, these were certainly welcome sentiments.

But as important as good intentions are, leaders--especially leaders of great nations undergoing historic transformation--are judged primarily by the results of their actions. And it is here, in the conditions of life in today’s Russia, that one finds the origin of the discrepancy between Gorbachev’s celebrity status abroad and his ignominious isolation at home. The former Soviet president complains that his rival, Boris Yeltsin, was essentially a destroyer, but the same is largely true, in a different sense, of Gorbachev himself.

Where it was sufficient to display benign instincts and to let people make their own choices, Gorbachev was up to the job--and the world is a much better place for it. But inside the Soviet Union itself, he is judged by another standard: by what replaced the Soviet order he destroyed. As the results of the June presidential election demonstrated, the consensus in Russia today is that Gorbachev was not much of an architect. Throughout his book, Gorbachev tries to respond to the numerous allegations that he was too inconsistent and too weak and had no clear plan for the Soviet Union. His defense, however, only contributes to the impression that his critics were right on target.

On the central issue of why he did not break with the Communist Party much sooner--or at least tell his colleagues on the Politburo that the time had come to go beyond half-measures “or else”--Gorbachev says that he was simply displaying necessary tactical flexibility to avoid being eaten alive by Party conservatives. But if this were so, it is difficult to understand why, even today, Gorbachev fails to acknowledge that the Party was essentially an instrument responsible for horrible terror and little that could be called genuinely constructive. “I categorically disagree with attempts to malign the whole history of the Party, portraying its founder as a villain, denying credit to the Party for what it has done for the homeland, and accusing it of stashing away billions of dollars in foreign banks,” he writes.

Yet Gorbachev never explains for what precisely the Party deserves credit. Nor does he explain what he means by “the Party.” After all, from almost the very beginning, it was not the rank-and-file but the Party elite, the so-called nomenklatura, who acted and spoke in the Party’s name. While defending “the Party,” he simultaneously portrays the nomenklatura--the real Party--as an obstacle to reform and a consistent opponent who let him down.

What Gorbachev seems to suffer from is a fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of the Soviet Communist Party and the regime over which it presided. Reflecting this basic blindness, Gorbachev’s greatest miscalculation was that he could eliminate the pervasive Party controls, destroy the coercive powers of the KGB, renounce the use of force and still expect his people to endorse “the socialist choice” and remain within the union that was, for so many Soviet nationalities, nothing short of a prison.

Ironically, although history was not on their side, Gorbachev’s conservative opponents had a far better analytical understanding of the process he unleashed. They realized that what Gorbachev sought to destroy was not merely repressive constraints on his beloved Soviet system, but its very foundations, without which the entire edifice was bound to collapse.

The former Soviet president complains bitterly that he was betrayed by his closest associates, who organized an attempted coup d’etat in August, 1991. Although he denies that he cooperated with the plotters or provided any justification for their actions, his own memoirs suggest that the situation was somewhat more complex. On many occasions, Gorbachev admits that he was less than candid with other Party leaders by intentionally downplaying his reformist designs to avoid a premature confrontation. He also reveals that in July 1991--one month before the attempted coup--he secretly promised Yeltsin that he would replace his principal colleagues in the Soviet leadership, including the prime minister, the defense minister and the chairman of the KGB. That conversation, however, was monitored and soon became known to the intended victims. It is thus unclear why Gorbachev feels betrayed by people who decided to strike back when he himself was negotiating their system of government, and their own personal roles, out of existence.

On the important question of relations between the Soviet republics, Gorbachev held similar illusions. He was, again, convinced that persuasion and “appeals” would be sufficient to resolve the ethnic crises that signaled the beginning of the end of the Soviet empire. In some cases, such as when discontent reached the Baltic republics, preemptive concessions certainly would have been the best means to avoiding a chain reaction. In others, such as Transcaucasia and Central Asia (where blood had already been spilled by disgruntled mobs), it would have been more appropriate to draw the line and demonstrate that the government was not a paper tiger. Gorbachev chose neither. In the end, he looked increasingly like a noble but hapless leader, much smaller than the great historical transformation he unleashed so courageously and yet so blindly.

His discussion of foreign policy issues only confirms this impression. As Gorbachev writes, when he became general secretary he had “a pretty clear idea of the first steps to be taken” and also an appreciation that “it was vital to improve [the Soviet] relationship with the West, particularly the United States.” It became clear, however, that he had no idea how to get from here to there. Gorbachev was totally unprepared for the way in which his new foreign policy thinking led to the collapse of Soviet hegemony in Eastern and Central Europe and, particularly, to the reunification of Germany. Thus, when the Soviet sphere of influence did begin to unravel, Moscow’s response was purely ad hoc. Again, Gorbachev’s intentions appear noble: He writes “not once did we contemplate the possibility of going back on the fundamental principles of the new political thinking--freedom of choice and noninterference in other countries’ domestic affairs.”

Nevertheless, it is hard to imagine an American president, with the notable exception of Jimmy Carter, who would sit idly through a geopolitical change of similar magnitude in the American sphere. Remarkably, Gorbachev never attempted to formulate, let alone defend, Soviet strategic interests in the new European environment. He could have demanded considerably greater compensation in return for agreeing to German unification. But just as he had difficulty taking a tough stand at home, he had no stomach for drawing the line in Europe. And while his Western counterparts were delighted with his acquiescence, they had no need to be generous when the concessions had already been granted.

This is not an easy book to read. Gorbachev begins with a complete transcript of his resignation address and later includes pages and pages likely to be of interest to only the most devoted reader, including detailed discussions of Central Committee plenary meetings, conversations with Bulgarian and Romanian leaders and descriptions of his wife Raisa’s activities during their travel abroad. Nevertheless, for those who want to understand how and why the Soviet Union came to an end, this basically honest and rather sad book is essential reading.