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The Gorbachev Factor by Archie Brown
Oxford University Press, 1996 406 pages; $30.00
In October 1980, approximately 10 months after Soviet troops moved into Afghanistan and two weeks before Ronald Reagan was elected president, Mikhail Gorbachev was promoted to full membership in the Soviet Politburo. The event was ignored by many political observers, including most scholars who claimed expertise in matters Russian and Soviet. Two prescient exceptions were Jerry Hough and Archie Brown.
In Soviet Leadership in Transition, published in late 1980, Hough asserted that "the generational change that is imminent in the Soviet Union gives us reason to hope." He specifically identified Mikhail Gorbachev as a possible successor to Leonid Brezhnev.
By 1978 Gorbachev had also caught the attention of Brown, an Oxford professor. In a meeting a year later, Zdenek Mlynar (a fellow student and close friend of Gorbachev's at Moscow University) seems to have convinced Brown that Gorbachev would be a serious reformer. Consequently, on October 22,1980, Brown told an audience at Yale that "an event of extraordinary potential significance took place in Moscow yesterday-the promotion to full membership of the Politburo of Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev."
Eventually Brown was invited to 10 Downing Street on the eve of Gorbachev's first visit to Britain in December 1984. Brown was asked to "speak specifically about Gorbachev to the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary."
Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was won over by the genuine substance she found in Gorbachev. "I like Mr. Gorbachev. We can do business together," she said. Brown, presumably, helped pave the way for that reception. And the prime minister's effusiveness seems to have influenced both President Reagan and Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, who subsequently nominated Gorbachev for the position of general secretary.
At the time, most Sovietologists were of a different opinion. They rejected the possibility that serious reformers could emerge from the bowels of the "Evil Empire." The dominant opinion had been expressed by Merle Fainsod three decades earlier: "The totalitarian regime does not shed its police-state characteristics: it dies when power is wrenched from its hands."
Thus Robert Conquest could write in the New Republic in January 1981: "It is true that the Soviet Union is faced with sharp economic and...