GORBACHEV WINS NOBEL PEACE PRIZE
WORLD HEAPS PRAISE ON SOVIET LEADER

Author: By Paul Quinn-Judge, Globe Staff

Date: Tuesday, October 16, 1990
Page: 1
Section: NATIONAL/FOREIGN

The first Soviet reactions to yesterday's announcement that Gorbachev had won the Nobel Peace Prize ranged mostly from indifference to hostility. They did not indicate that the prize would help shore up Gorbachev's difficult domestic position.

For the average Soviet citizen, the country's administrative paralysis and economic disorder overshadow the remarkable scope of the changes triggered by Gorbachev since he came to power.

At that time the world was divided into two heavily overarmed camps. The Soviet Union presided over a network of military alliances that ranged from Eastern Europe to Afghanistan, Indochina, North Korea, and Latin America. At the apex of the Soviet political system stood the Communist Party general secretary.

Then, in March 1985, Gorbachev was named general secretary, and soon massive global changes began.

"Lovely smile, iron grip," is how Andrei A. Gromyko, the late foreign minister, described Gorbachev when he proposed him for the leadership. Gorbachev's candidacy was given powerful support by Communist Party bosses such as Yegor K. Ligachev and Boris N. Yeltsin.

The senior officials knew the economy was in trouble, and they wanted to revive it by cracking down on corruption, tightening up on discipline and speeding up industrial production.

Gorbachev soon left them far behind. He encouraged an independent press -- now largely critical of him and his policies -- and in so doing made the word "glasnost," openness, known throughout the world.

He developed a strange love-hate relationship with the prickly dissident Andrei D. Sakharov, the Soviet Union's only other individual Peace Prize winner. He talked the party into accepting a real working Parliament. And he broke the party's official 70-year monopoly on power.

He pulled troops out of Afghanistan and helped achieve a negotiated solution to the long-running regional conflicts in Angola, Nicaragua and Cambodia. He visited China in May 1989, thereby heightening world attention to worker-student democracy demonstrations there.

He recently established diplomatic relations with South Korea.

He cultivated unprecedented close relations with Presidents Reagan and Bush, negotiated major cuts in nuclear arms, and started to convert the defense industry to peacetime needs. The defense budget and the size of the armed forces have been cut significantly.

In Eastern Europe, observers say, he quietly greased the skids under some leaders and stood aloof as others, such as East Germany's Erich Honecker, were swept away.

But instead of reforming the Soviet system, Gorbachev has presided over part of its destruction. Perestroika, restructuring, has been replaced in many ways by unraveling.

A true believer in democratic socialism, Gorbachev hoped to revive the socialist ideal by stripping it of the distortions it had suffered under Joseph Stalin and Leonid I. Brezhnev. This would, he believed, reveal the ideal in all its beauty, and rally the people to it.

He replaced class conflict by "common human values" that transcend class boundaries. And he emphasized an interdependent world where environmental and health problems could only be solved by all countries working together.

But instead the Soviet public has interpreted news of each previous ''distortion," from Stalin's massacres to the Chernobyl cover-up, as proof that the system is politically, morally and economically corrupt.

And empty store shelves have blunted interest in Gorbachev's new thinking at home. For months, Gorbachev and his advisers have been wrestling with internal economic reform, but he has failed so far to endorse a concrete plan to turn conditions around.

Increasingly, analysts say, the public is rejecting the Soviet system and its ideology.

In the past eight months, the Communist Party has lost political control of the country's two main cities and six of its 15 republics. Most republics have passed sovereignty declarations that give them the right to reject any laws issued by Moscow that they do not like. Bloody clashes in the republics of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia have stained what has otherwise been the remarkably bloodless collapse of an empire.

Those who know him say that Gorbachev, the man who triggered all this, is a complex and often contradictory person, a mix of pragmatist and dreamer, in- fighter and idealist, man of action and now, a leader of perhaps fatal irresolution.

Most people who know him say he is driven.

Anatoly Chernyayev, an aide who has known Gorbachev for almost 40 years, said last night that the Soviet leader's main motivation is "a sense of responsibility, a feeling that the Soviet people just could not go on living the way they were."

What Gorbachev is striving to do, said another aide, Georgi Shakhnazarov, is "to bring the Soviet Union back into Europe," from which it has been separated by decades of distrust, conflict and ideological competition.

Yesterday, as the Nobel award became known, Gorbachev was sweeping from meeting to meeting, conferring with visiting US executives, personal aides, parliamentary leaders and newspaper editors on his planned economic reforms.

He works a staccato 18-hour day. The pace is debilitating, aides say. The relentlessly hands-on, problem-solving approach may, some close to him worry, disperse his attention, preventing him from focusing on the big picture of looming chaos.

A small group of advisers has helped Gorbachev form many of his revolutionary ideas. All have unorthodox backgrounds for presidential intimates. Most are intellectuals with university training in the humanities -- a departure from the leadership tradition of engineering degrees. And most, at some point in their careers, have run seriously afoul of the hierarchy.

Shakhnazarov, who specializes in Eastern Europe, believes in world government, has published works ranging from political theory to science fiction. ("Are you writing anything these days?" a reporter asked him at a dinner party several months ago. "A new constitution, actually," he replied.)

Overseeing foreign policy is Anatoly Chernyayev, a self-effacing historian with contacts and friendships stretching deep into what used to be regarded as dissident circles. Alexandr Yakovlev, the ideologist of reform, spent 10 years in diplomatic exile in Canada. Of the inner circle, only Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze, once the party chief in Georgia, comes from a classic Communist apparatchik background.

The changes that have overtaken the Soviet Union were reflected in the reaction of the Supreme Soviet, the Soviet parliament, to the news of the Nobel award.

The parliament had assembled yesterday morning expecting to receive details of a new plan to save the country from economic collapse. But the presentation was postponed. When Anatoly Lukyanov, chairman of the Supreme Soviet, announced the news of the Nobel Prize just before the lunch break, the 400-odd deputies responded with a flutter of applause.

But some members of parliament, like the conservative and promilitary Yevgeny Kogan from Estonia, did not bother to clap. Outside the hall another conservative, Lt. Col. Nikolai Petrushenko, scornfully compared the Nobel to the meaningless awards that the Soviet government used to routinely award Brezhnev, now in disgrace.

The other end of the reform spectrum seemed equally cool.

A prominent liberal Soviet journalist warned that the award "will only further irritate the people at a time when their patience is near breaking point."

And at a brief press conference after the morning's session of parliament, Shevardnadze seemed to be betraying anxiety at Gorbachev's hesitation over economic reform. The Nobel Prize will, he said, "stimulate the president to implement our line of perestroika and reform more forcefully."

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