After taking office, Gorbachev saw his faith in the reformist commitment of the party-at-large repeatedly disappointed (something that he acknowledges not only retarded economic reforms but later led to his downfall, thanks to misplaced trust in those who would later betray him). He'd been chosen to get the country moving again, but his efforts to do so collided with entrenched interests at every turn. So he grew increasingly radical, and within a year began pushing for major foreign-policy changes abroad while unleashing glasnost to overcome resistance at home. In 1987 he outlined plans for democratization--amazingly, to include multi-candidate elections--that were also later approved at an extraordinary party conference in 1988.

These moves helped shift the locus of domestic political authority from the party and military-industrial elite to a new public sphere, a transformation carefully analyzed in George Breslauer's Gorbachev and Yeltsin as Leaders. It was also in 1988 that Gorbachev enhanced his international authority, and silenced most Western skeptics, with the steps laid out in his December UN address: deep, unilateral arms cuts; rejection of ideology in international relations; and a call for a new world order of cooperation in solving such global problems as poverty, pollution, crime and terrorism.

Some in Washington remained unconvinced, however. The new Bush Administration, still not sure if Gorbachev was "for real" or just trying a ruse, put the brakes on progress in US-Soviet relations with a yearlong "pause" that deprived perestroika of critical economic and diplomatic support just when it was most needed. Breslauer writes that Gorbachev's authority was partly "hostage to the behavior of the United States," which, as if oblivious to his domestic opposition, would offer nothing more than "to sign deals that involved Soviet acceptance of maximal U.S. terms." Perestroika benefited from the thaw's positive legacies, not the least of which was Gorbachev's team of reformist aides, all children of the Twentieth Congress. But Gorbachev was also haunted by the negative lesson of Khrushchev's fate, namely the danger of being removed for pushing too fast. One of the great "what ifs" of the late cold war is how perestroika might have fared had Bush Senior--who was at least publicly committed to the USSR's reform, not its collapse--shared some of the "vision thing" so eloquently displayed in Conversations With Gorbachev.

A notable aspect of Breslauer's study is its revision of the author's previous framework--his well-known authority-building model developed in an earlier book on Khrushchev and Brezhnev--in light of perestroika. And it leads him, in analyzing Gorbachev and Yeltsin, to place greater emphasis on the impact of leaders' personalities and beliefs, rather than the constraints of the political system, in explaining their policy choices. Even more could be made of this, especially for Gorbachev's foreign policy, where the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear reactor accident--arguably the single strongest impetus toward his radical "new thinking" and the policies that soon followed--is largely overlooked. Breslauer also addresses the kind of "what ifs" noted above, counterfactuals ignored in most writings on Soviet politics. Here he stresses the centrality of Gorbachev's principled beliefs and commitment to nonviolence in the USSR's democratization and the cold war's peaceful end, outcomes judged unlikely under any of his rivals for power.

This emphasis on leadership holds for post-Soviet politics as well, with Breslauer attributing to Yeltsin's character and style decisive influence in the USSR's collapse and Russia's subsequent travails. Eschewing the poles of lionization and demonization, Breslauer compares Yeltsin and Khrushchev as anti-establishment populists. He also recognizes Yeltsin's sincere reformism (at least early on) in his politically suicidal 1987 criticism of Gorbachev's timidity; who foresaw the possibility of Yeltsin's political rebirth just two years later via the new electoral system that Gorbachev himself would create? But Yeltsin the erstwhile anti-establishmentarian, who as president of Russia later admitted that "I do not pretend to understand the philosophy behind our economic reforms," would respond to the failure of these reforms by discarding his populism to become a reclusive patriarch dispensing favors (and invading Chechnya) to shore up his authority in a sadly traditional fashion. Another irony is that the onetime corruption fighter would preside over an unprecedented explosion of criminality and corruption in post-Soviet Russia.

Yet this corruption was in key respects aided and abetted by the West. How different might Russia look today if the leading powers and their financial institutions had appreciated Russia's unique problems and the unique solutions they required? How different might world politics be today if, instead of paying lip service to Gorbachev's entreaties for joint solutions to global problems, and instead of snubbing post-Soviet Russia as a genuine partner, the United States had taken these initiatives seriously?

Of course, Washington alone is hardly to blame for the failures and missed opportunities. Soviet/Russian mistakes and misdeeds have also been many. Neither should we overlook another counterfactual--how much worse things could have been--by forgetting those points where American leaders acted with wisdom and restraint. For example, how tragically might the Cuban missile crisis have ended had Kennedy cut diplomacy short and followed his hawkish advisers' calls for a "preventive" strike? And how hair trigger might the nuclear standoff have grown had President Nixon chosen proliferation of antimissile systems over negotiation and stable deterrence? Now that the second Bush Administration has apparently decided that such hard-learned lessons no longer apply--embracing an aggressive unilateralism while spurning serious arms control for a new generation of defensive and offensive (including nuclear) weapons--reconsideration of the conventional wisdom is all the more urgent.

Given fears about the spread of nuclear arms, such rethinking should include the US failure to ratify a comprehensive test ban. It might also revisit the forgotten drama of Reykjavík. That was the 1986 summit where only the panicked intervention of several presidential aides--some of whom advise the current US Administration--pulled Ronald Reagan back from the brink of agreement to a sweeping nuclear weapons ban. (Gorbachev, for his part, insisted on limits to antimissile systems.) How different might our world be today if, in place of their short-term preoccupation with pressing America's advantage, those aides had shared some of Gorbachev's long-term vision? How much safer might we all be if, instead of the rivalry that encourages proliferation, Washington and Moscow had joined forces in pressing for global nuclear reductions? Viewed myopically, American victories have been, and perhaps will continue to be, impressive. But from a wider perspective--considering both what might have been and what still could be--history's verdict will likely be considerably harsher.

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