NO HONOR IN HIS OWN COUNTRY

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, April 13, 1993                   TAG: 9304130215
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: A1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: DAVE ADDIS LANDMARK NEWS SERVICE
DATELINE: RICHMOND                                LENGTH: Medium
NO HONOR IN HIS OWN COUNTRY
THE LOSS of an empire, roaring inflation and the indignity of a proud country begging its old enemies for help: To many Russians, this is Mikhail Gorbachev's legacy. But future generations may judge him more kindly.
The reverence that Mikhail Gorbachev commands when he speaks abroad makes it difficult to understand, especially for Americans, how the Nobel laureate and champion of democratic reform could have fallen so far from grace at home.
A young Moscow native, transfixed by Gorbachev's speech in Richmond on Saturday night, was asked to explain this. Olga Dobrokhotova, a student at Virginia Commonwealth University, just chuckled: "Because he did more for the U.S. than he ever did for us. . . . Our people are hurting, they're very angry.
"Still," she said, casting an appreciative glance to the stage where Gorbachev sat, "he is a legend."
True enough. But democracies, even emerging ones, have created and destroyed their own legends since the first knife slit Julius Caesar's toga. It's seldom a surprise that things go awry, but the reasons are often compelling.
To understand what happened to Gorbachev requires a quick little game of suspended reality - just like the Russians have been doing. Pretend for a momentthat it's Easter weekend of 1994 and you've been living under President Clinton's economic reforms for more than a year. You're married, you have a couple of kids, and you're making, say, $50,000 a year. Life is sweet - or so it should be.
But then you go shopping for a car and you find that a basic Ford sedan is selling for, say, $750,000. A carton of Marlboros is $600. A can of Coke is about $60. A cabbie taking you across town to the office demands $750 for a five-mile ride.
If you lived this way for a while you would understand roughly the impact that the reforms unleashed by Gorbachev have had on the average Russian wage-earner. Think for a moment what your response would be, under these circumstances, if someone asked your opinion of Bill Clinton. Now you're beginning to understand the opprobrium the Russians have for Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev.
The worst of the economic wreckage has happened since Boris Yeltsin took the presidency. But blame-placing is as popular and intricate a Russian pastime as chess. Yeltsin has popularity problems of his own, but Gorbachev gets most of the blame: He's they guy who opened the lid on the box, not quite sure what might be inside.
Still, there's more pushing the Russians' anger than just high prices and monstrous inflation. Even among progressives there is a strong sense of the loss of greatness, of the splintering of a respected empire.
Despite the television images of thousands in the streets under red, hammer-and-sickle banners, those who would truly wish a return to the days of Stalin and Brezhnev are a small and aging minority. But stories of Russians being treated like lepers in the vast lands they once commanded - the Baltics, the Caucuses, even Ukraine - are difficult medicine for a people weaned on national and ethnic pride. Begging to the West for food and money is equally demeaning. These are the sins for which they hold Gorbachev accountable.
Westerners argue that even with these failings, Gorbachev deserves a place of respect for setting a path to the end of the Cold War. Russians can be slow to anger and even slower to forgive, but there are signs they might soften their view of Gorbachev, in time.
Tatiana Malkina, at 25 one of the most well-known of the new school of aggressive Russian journalists, gave this view in a recent Moscow interview when asked if her generation will ever come to honor the architect of perestroika:
"We were of another generation . . . and it was funny for us to imagine, impossible for us to imagine to live in this double-minded world, you know, like our parents. We were not going to live this way.
"Actually, we should be grateful to this guy because he gave us the opportunity to live the way we wanted to live, without going to prison. I think if there had been no Gorbachev it is most likely that the majority of our generation would have become dissidents and would have had a lot of trouble with the KGB.
"We felt this way because we were just normal . . . not because we are better, but because the time was different, the air was different."
That difference in the air, that ability to live free, is Gorbachev's legacy to her generation, Malkina said. But it may take more than a generation for the pain of his reforms to fade, and only then will Mikhail Gorbachev command among his own people the respect and admiration he commands in distant lands.

Dave Addis recently returned from six months in Moscow, where he wrote for the Russian business newspaper Commersant and Moscow Guardian magazine. His work was sponsored by The (Norfolk) Virginian-Pilot and the National Forum Foundation of Washington, D.C.

by Bhavesh Jinadra by CNB