Archie Brown's knowledge of Mikhail Gorbachev and Gorbachevism is unsurpassed. This new book, which includes updates of previously published studies along with several new chapters, highlights the dynamics and significance of perestroika as a major attempt to overhaul the institutional and cultural foundations of Sovietism. As a matter of fact, as this book points out, nothing was foreordained, and Gorbachev's personal interventions did often result in decisive turning points in Soviet and world history. On the basis of remarkable archival research, interviews with key actors, and extensive use of personal memoirs, Brown provides a gripping account of the political and moral battles surrounding Gorbachev's efforts to bring down the ossified system inherited from his predecessors and embark on a genuine New Course meant to democratize socialism. His main argument, original and persuasvive, is that Gorbachev was in fact a genuine Marxist revisionist, who, while paying lip service to Lenin's iconic figure, did in fact move away from Bolshevism as a political culture based on fanaticism, sectarianism, and voluntarism to a self-styled version of Marxist revisionism.

In so doing, Brown argues—elaborating on his previous interpretation put forward in The Gorbachev Factor (1997), his outstanding biography of the last Soviet president—the general secretary of the Communist Party relied on a group of party intellectuals who informed and influenced his own political thought and major choices. This is indeed the most exciting part of the book: a journey through the minds of those advisors and associates who not only shared Gorbachev's reformist drive but also contributed to its radicalization. Among those neo-Marxist revisionists disgusted with the prevailing hypocrisy and disenchanted with the obsolete Leninist faith, party ideologue Aleksandr Yakovlev stands out as the most articulate. He was also vilified by hard-core communists, secret service (KGB) top brass, and Great Russian xenophobes for being Gorbachev's “evil spirit” and an arch-traitor to socialism. Others belonging to the same group were philosopher Ivan Frolov, political scientist Georgiy Shakhnazarov, and Gorbachev's foreign policy advisor Anatoliy Chernyaev. Many had worked in Prague in the 1970s as editors of the monthly World Marxist Review and were attracted to unorthodox, heretical ideas.

To those who expressed skepticism about Gorbachev's determination to go beyond the boundaries of a revamped Leninism (including many Soviet dissidents, as well as Western academics and politicians), Brown responds by examining the former Soviet leader's unpublished 1989 manuscript in which he delineated the main directions for an overall pluralist renewal of the Soviet system. By promoting the idea of a system based on the rule of law, Gorbachev did in fact unleash an unstoppable political process with world-historical effects. In 1988, Brown argues, a major shift occurred in Gorbachev's intellectual awakening. By that time, he had already publicly condemned Stalin's “unforgetttable and unforgivable crimes.” For all practical purposes, he converted to a version of Marxist revisionism directly inspired by Eduard Bernstein's evolutionary socialism. Nothing could be more remote from Lenin's cult of the vanguard party and obsession with monolithic dictatorship than this rehabilitation of pluralism. Denouncing Stalin's reign of terror, Gorbachev was in fact bidding farewell to Lenin's ideology-driven partocratic system.

Contrary to those who consider civil society pressure as the major cause of perestroika, Brown considers that “with the principal exception of Poland, it is doubtful that the growth of civil society should be seen as a source of fundamental political change in the communist world rather than as a consequence of it” (p. 157). It was “institutional amphibiousness,” a concept he borrows from X. I. Ding (“Institutional Amphibiousness and the Transition from Communism: The Case of China,” British Journal of Political Science 24 [July 1994]: 293–318), and elaborates most creatively upon, that explains much of the transformations. In other words, institutions designed to foster and legitimize the system (ideological departments, party academy, theoretical journals, think tanks) came to undermine the role they were supposed to play. This may explain unexpected intellectual trajectories within the nomenklatura, including some spectacular apostasies, but they were themselves responses to the system's insoluble moral and cultural crisis. Cynicism, corruption, and cronyism were the rampant pathologies to which Gorbachevism tried to offer antidotes.

Brown's thoughtful analysis culminates in the final chapter on Gorbachev and his era in perspective. Whereas Yakovlev came to the conclusion that Stalinism was inseparable from the whole Bolshevik tradition, which needed to be dramatically and drastically jettisoned,Gorbachev continued to stick to much of the old ideological dramaturgy. He did it for tactical reasons, but also because of his deep inner convictions. Together with many of his associates, he was a child of the 20th Communist Party Congress, the 1956 watershed conclave in which Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin's myth. For Yakovlev, Lenin was guilty of crimes against humanity, a stance that Gorbachev would barely endorse.Yet, the break with Leninism, less strident than Yakovlev's, was real. Having myself expressed doubts on this issue, I find Brown's arguments rather convincing. At the end of the day, one can see Gorbachev as a combination of Imre Nagy and Alexander Dubcek: unable to fully abandon the outworn Leninist model, desperately searching for “socialism with a human face,” torn between nostalgia for old ideals and the tragic awareness of their hollowness. More than a neo-Menshevik, or a Western-style social democrat à la Willy Brandt (whom he admires), Gorbachev remains the last and most influential of those East European Leninist leaders who tried to humanize an inherently inhuman system.

This masterful study concludes with an inventory of the major failures and successes associated with the seven years of Gorbachev's rule. First and foremost, his error was not championing economic reforms in the direction of a market economy. Second, he reacted late and often sef-defeatingly to the rise of centrifugal nationalist and separatist movements. Third, he underestimated the nomenkatura's capacity for retrenchement and delayed an alliance with the genuine democratic forces. It was indeed Boris Yeltsin who knew how to capitalize politically on the tempestuous rise of civil society in Russia. On the other hand, it was thanks to Gorbachev and the Gorbachevites that the USSR moved from a state based on contempt for the individual and the rule of law to one in which human and civil rights were taken seriously. Whatever one thinks of Gorbachev's post-Leninist political philosophy, it is certain that he disassociated himself from the obnoxiously despotic features of the old regime. It is the merit of this illuminating book to show how Gorbachev's mental liberation coincided with, and to a great extent caused, the emancipation of Soviet society from the spell of an obtuse ideology based on lies, fear, and opportunism.