ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, June 23, 1996 TAG: 9606240117
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: MOSCOW
SOURCE: RAY MOSELEY CHICAGO TRIBUNE
Hardly anyone noticed, but Russia's presidential election last Sunday marked perhaps the final humiliation, and political burial, of Mikhail Gorbachev.
He once ranked as one of the two most powerful political leaders in the world. He changed the course of history as he presided over the collapse of the Soviet Union. But he got a mere 0.5 percent of the vote in one of the most spectacularly failed attempts at a political comeback imaginable.
He received about 350,000 votes out of 70 million cast. Even a famous eye doctor with no previous political experience polled more. Gorbachev finished seventh in a 10-man race, besting only three complete political non-entities.
Gorbachev, 65, the Soviet president from 1985 to 1991, has long been regarded abroad as a great statesman who ended the Cold War and paved the way for a return to freedom in Russia.
With his policies of glasnost and perestroika, he opened up what had been a closed system, remained passive as the Berlin Wall came down and allowed the fall of Soviet satellite regimes throughout Eastern Europe.
But at home, many Russians reviled him for the collapse of the Soviet Union and the economic and social chaos that followed.
In the months leading up to the presidential campaign, he tried unsuccessfully to unite all ``democrats'' in a contest to defeat both President Boris Yeltsin and Communist challenger Gennady Zyuganov. Gorbachev implied he should be at the head of the democratic ticket.
When that strategy failed, he entered the campaign on his own as an independent, center-left candidate and spent most of his effort in an increasingly bitter attack on Yeltsin.
He attracted so little attention that many people around the world may have been unaware that he was a candidate.
The question even Gorbachev may now be asking himself is why he went through with it. The answer would appear to be that, like many politicians who have enjoyed great fame and power, he deluded himself into believing he really could win.
The delusion may have been compounded in his case by the fact he had never before run for office in a popular vote.
When he emerged from a Moscow voting booth last Sunday, Gorbachev confidently predicted victory and told reporters he had voted for ``the most worthy candidate.'' After the vote result was announced, he did not appear in public.
He spent the evening with former U.S. Secretary of State Alexander Haig, in Moscow as part of an election-monitoring group.
Gorbachev's wife, Raisa, may have had a more realistic expectation of the election outcome. Several weeks ago she started selling off to Moscow retail shops the fancy gowns she had worn as the president's wife, saying she did not think she would need them again.
Gorbachev left the Soviet presidency in 1991 after an attempted coup against him that was thwarted by Yeltsin with the backing of the armed forces. During the coup attempt, he and his family were held prisoner for three days at a dacha on the Black Sea, and when he returned to Moscow he found his power had ebbed away and now belonged to Yeltsin.
Since leaving office, he has headed the Gorbachev Foundation in Moscow and has been a sought-after public speaker in the United States and other Western countries.
LENGTH: Medium: 66 linesby CNB