GORBACHEV BASKS IN BERLIN CELEBRATION

WASHINGTON -- It is not often in human history that a leader whose country has lost its position in the world because of his actions attends joyful events celebrating the loss. Much less common is it that he considers himself a hero for what he has done. Offhand, I cannot think of any such amazing -- indeed, astonishing -- time.

Yet such an event occurred at this week's 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and subsequent fall of Soviet Communism and transformation of the world.

Who else but the former leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, could have pulled off such an amazing stunt? Who else but the famous "Gorby," still adored by the Western world but despised by his fellow countrymen for (shall we say?) destroying their empire, could have made his trip to Berlin this week look, well, normal?

Indeed, Gorbachev seemed to be having a lot of fun in the "new Berlin," as he basked in the admiration of the West. He has been very quiet and secluded in Moscow since his replacement in power by Boris Yeltsin in the early '90s, but now he was all over town -- "good-time" Mikhail.

At an unusual free-wheeling press conference, for instance, he went on at some length about why he was there. "I am proud that we -- and by that, I mean both Western and Eastern European countries -- found an approach that took everyone's interest into account so this most painful thing (the division of the two Germanys) was liquidated. ... If the Soviet Union had wanted, it could have stopped reunification. And what would have happened then? I don't know. Maybe World War III."

Most analysts credit several factors with leading to the unexpected fall of the Berlin Wall on Nov. 9, 1989, but all agree that without Mikhail Gorbachev, it would never have happened, at least at that time. From 1985 onward, seeing the need for reform in the tightly sealed Soviet state, he devised both "perestroika" (a restructuring of the state) and "glasnost" (the opening of the state). Most of his fellow Communists were horrified and revile him 'til this day.

"On the day I became Soviet leader, in March 1985," Gorbachev told The Nation this month, "I had a special meeting with the leaders of the Warsaw Pact countries, and told them: 'You are independent, and we are independent. You are responsible for your policies; we are responsible for ours. We will not intervene in your affairs, I promise you.' And we did not intervene, not once." The stage was set for Berlin, Nov. 9, 1989.

But for Gorbachev, now a "private citizen" who heads the Gorbachev Foundation in Moscow and often speaks in the West, the process he foresaw was never completed because the United States indulged in a "victor's complex" once the Cold War was over, trying to overextend its power in Russia and the East.

"The Americans should understand that their monopoly has ended," he said at another meeting in Berlin. "I do not envy Obama because I think changing and 'restructuring' America is not easier than changing the Soviet Union."

Nor does he believe that it was the Americans who actually "won" the Cold War after the Berlin Wall went down, even after tens of thousands of East Europeans poured out and even once the Soviet Union collapsed economically and politically by December 1991.

"If the new Soviet leadership and its new foreign policy had not existed, nothing would have happened," he told The Nation.

Moreover, the idea of "winning the Cold War" was bad for America.

"When people came to the conclusion that they had won the Cold War," Gorbachev continued, "they concluded that they didn't need to change. Let others change."

This led, he said, from the idea of gradual reform in Russia under his administration to the idea of an American-backed sudden leap under Yeltsin -- and this was impossible; this was only more "adventurism."

When I met Gorbachev and interviewed him a year ago at one of his foundation conferences in Venice, it seemed to me that resentment hung over him like a dull cloak. His expressions were unrelievedly dour. He was continually trying to vindicate himself. At one point, he virtually proclaimed to a small group of us, as if trying to reassert his lost importance: "I was not an accidental leader."

Yet when I asked him about democracy in Russia, he told me: "It's a road in the construction of a democratic society. We're on the road. I believe we're more or less in the middle. We have a long way. In the West, democracy took a long time. ... Today we are in crisis, and we don't know how it will all end. It is a crisis of all systems and of the very model of democracy. We need to search for a way out of this dead end."

But let's return to the original premise. There are few less-popular men in Russia today than Mikhail Gorbachev. Russians do not see him, as he sees himself, as a man who tried to make reforms and failed. They see him as the man who threw the Soviet empire onto the trash heap of history. When he ran for office afterward in Russia, he received 1, sometimes 2 percent of the vote.

Russians moved on to a new authoritarianism under former spy Vladimir Putin and are apparently ready to eternally despise Gorbachev's "weakness."

So as strange as it first seems that Gorbachev, the man who destroyed the Soviet empire, should go to Berlin to celebrate that event with the historic enemy, in the end it seems less odd. Ironically, he can be at home there; he can have fun; people hail him, respect him, like him. His ideas are their ideas. He can pretend that his people will adopt them later, too. And he might even smile.