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liberate Kuwait and to cut Iraq down to size. Gorbachev is not a stupid man. Faced with a choice of Iraq or the West, he chose the West.
    As a pragmatic politician, Gorbachev sought to combat the apathy of the Soviet people by denouncing the Stalinist past, allowing criticism of the current system, and decentralizing some power to the republics. He also chose to shake up the Soviet establishment through glasnost, to seek leverage over the nomenklatura through the threat of further democratization; and to try to solve Soviet economic failings through perestroika. As a loyal Communist, however, he could not bring himself to cut his umbilical cord to the Communist party. He refused to institute genuine democracy—the Soviet people were still denied the power to change their central government through the ballot box—or to run in a competitive election himself. He rejected proposals to legitimize private property and to free prices. As a Russian nationalist, he refused to allow the non-Russian nations to exercise their constitutional right to secede, instead contriving a secession law harder to work than Rubik’s Cube.
    To ask whether Gorbachev was sincere begs the question. Unlike his predecessors, he recognized the fundamental inhumanity of the system founded under Stalin. But like his predecessors, he sincerely believed that the ideology of communism remained the solution, not the problem. “I am a Communist, a convinced Communist,” he said in 1990. “For some that might be a fantasy. But for me, it is my main goal.” He reaffirmed this view in early 1991, saying, “I am a Communist and adhere to the communist idea. And with this I will leave for the other world.”
    In November 1990, Gorbachev gave a candid speech toSoviet intellectuals that provided great insight into his heartfelt views. He described a conversation he had had with Shevardnadze in March 1985, shortly after taking power. Reflecting on the course of Soviet history, Shevardnadze had said that since the 1917 revolution “everything had gone rotten.” Gorbachev had stated that he concurred, that “we could not live as we had lived previously.” But in the rest of the speech he indicated that on two principles—retaining socialism and keeping the Soviet Union intact—he would not budge. He said, “There are the founders of Moscow News, and they will say, ‘President, stop assuring us and swearing that you are a follower of socialism.’ But why should I stop if it is a profound conviction of mine? I will not stop; I will not stop as long as I have the opportunity of doing things precisely in such a way.” On retaining the union, he insisted, “We must not split up. I came and said honestly at a Supreme Soviet session: ‘We cannot split up, comrades. Whether we like it or not, this is how things have turned out for us. If we begin to split up, there will be a war, a terrible war.’ ”
    Gorbachev’s adamant refusal to abandon the discredited doctrine of socialism and to move away from the center’s imperial domination of the republics soon isolated him from the growing Soviet pro-reform movement. Outpaced by his own reforms, he resorted to rhetorical inflation, praising “democracy” and “free markets” and eventually even calling communism “an outdated ideological dogma.” But his actions did not measure up to his words. Increasingly, he appeared to become yesterday’s man. His Communist beliefs and his Russian nationalism were blinders constraining his vision of the Soviet future. Like a circus performer on a high wire, he swayed from side to side, never too far one way or the other. He knew that if he fell, there would be no safety net to catch him.
    A key turning point came in September 1990, when he rejected the Shatalin five-hundred-day plan to transform the Soviet system into a market economy. He then swung decisively to side with