Mikhail Gorbachev

AND IN SEVENTH place, with half a percent of the vote . . . Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev.Seventh place? Half a percent?Six years ago Gorbachev was master of the world's second superpower and of a nuclear arsenal capable of ending human life on the planet. He won the Nobel Peace Prize and was Time magazine's Man of the Decade. And now 199 out of every 200 voters want someone else for president. Gorbachev has become an Unperson -- just like all those people who were written out of history by Stalin's purges.

MOSCOW - No more revolutions or counter-revolutions for Russia, President Vladimir V. Putin was saying yesterday in his state-of-the-nation address - just steady reform. But as he spoke, a Kremlin affiliate was ousting the management of NTV, the country's only independent television network, thrusting the company - and the country - into a showdown over free speech. NTV's employees holed up in the broadcast center last night, vowing to resist. Police circled the building. Putin, said Mikhail Berger, the editor of the newspaper Segodnya, was really delivering two messages yesterday: a decorative one for public consumption and then the real one, against independent journalism.

ALWAYS THE fashion plate, he looked rumpled, tired and disheveled. But when Mikhail Gorbachev came off the plane early Thursday morning, he was bursting with anger at the men who tried to kidnap history.Sandy Grady writes for the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain.

DENVER -- Until recently it was true, as a wit said, that British socialists looked upon the mess they had made of things and called it the crisis of capitalism. Now they look upon Margaret Thatcher's success in cleaning up that mess and call it a mandate for lecturing Europe's less right-thinking socialists, as Tony Blair recently did, on the need to emancipate themselves from the statism of "more spending or regulation."Mr. Blair, Britain's 44-year-old prime minister since May, came here representing the second-freest and second-strongest economy among those of the eight summiteers.

The good news is that the stock market thinks the recession is over. The bad news is that the market is always wrong.Mikhail Gorbachev wants to sit at a Western economic summit, soon, before the folks back home dump him.The disarming United States will soon be in no position to fight another Persian Gulf war. Ditto, of course, for Iraq.There may not be global warming. There sure is U.S. warming.Cheer up. Baltimore set the style in propeller beanies.

The stunning ouster of Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev by a hardline troika in a quasi-military coup presents the West with an exceedingly difficult dilemma: Whether to support the new regime, or to leave the Soviet Union to stew in its own juices. As distasteful as it may be, it's likely the West will simply have to swallow hard, and deal with the new "emergency committee."Why? Because there is a worse alternative to authoritarian rule in Russia, and that is the rapid, uncontrolled descent into chaos and civil war. Better to have a known authoritarian hand in control of the 30,000 nuclear weapons in the Soviet Union than to have a thousand unknown hands in control.

TWO WEEKS before Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as president of the Soviet Union, New York Times columnist William Safire opened his column with the following sentence:"Revealing the true colors of a tyrant, Mikhail Gorbachev now seeks to thwart the democratic will of the independent republics his former empire by bidding for the support of the veteran Red Army generals." The ostensible basis for this arrant nonsense was the fact that Gorbachev had held meetings with his military commanders. By that criterion, Safire as easily could have written that George Bush was plotting to become a "tyrant" for meeting with Gen. Colin Powell.

Now that the military coup in the Soviet Union has collapsed and Mikhail Gorbachev has been returned to power, The Evening Sun would like to know if you think that the time is right for the United States to help the Soviet Union. Should the U.S. send food to the Soviet people? Should Congress grant the Soviet Union most-favored-nation trade status?The call is local and must be made from a tone phone. The SUNDIAL number is 783-1800 or, in Anne Arundel County, 268-7736. When you reach SUNDIAL, enter category 4600 and wait for instructions from the announcer.

Eight hard-line Soviet Communists have been named as instigators of the plot to overthrow Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. At least five have been arrested, one killed himself, one is hospitalized under guard, and there are arrest warrants for several others. Gorbachev says there will be no "witch-hunt" as in historic Soviet purges, but said there must be no danger of repeating the coup attempt.The Evening Sun wants to know what punishment you think the surviving coup leaders should face.

Paris -- The time has arrived to say a respectful word about Mikhail Gorbachev.His struggle to maintain a union of the Soviet successor states has been inextricably entangled with his attempt to keep personal power. He has not been an easy man, but a devious and determined one, and his story is not over. Nothing in this will surprise those interested in what the historians of an earlier day (the term now is unfashionable) called ''great men.''Is Mikhail Gorbachev a great man? I would say, first, that while great men are not the same as good men, moral vision is what characterizes the greatest of great men. Mikhail Gorbachev has given no evidence of a moral vision to compare with that of the Lincolns or de Gaulles or Churchills (even conceding that Lincoln in his time was thought an ignorant backwoodsman, and de Gaulle and Churchill thought adventurers and opportunists)

WASHINGTONIANS are disgusted with diplomatic immunity that would protect the alleged drunk and speeding driver of a car that banged into others at Dupont Circle in the wee hours of Jan. 4, killing Joviane Waltrick, 16, of Kensington, Md., a ninth grader and Brazilian citizen.Under rules that have come down through the centuries, Gueorgui Makharadze, second-ranking diplomat at the embassy of Georgia, a former Soviet republic, refused a Breathalyzer test. He may leave the country. To appease public opinion, the State Department intended to seek a waiver of diplomatic immunity as soon as the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia filed charges.

AND IN SEVENTH place, with half a percent of the vote . . . Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev.Seventh place? Half a percent?Six years ago Gorbachev was master of the world's second superpower and of a nuclear arsenal capable of ending human life on the planet. He won the Nobel Peace Prize and was Time magazine's Man of the Decade. And now 199 out of every 200 voters want someone else for president. Gorbachev has become an Unperson -- just like all those people who were written out of history by Stalin's purges.

When he was General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Mikhail S. Gorbachev introduced a new word into the Russian language: "konsensus." But people got so tired of hearing about "konsensus" that it became a sort of running joke.Now, in the fractured body politic of Russia, where the splinters have splinters, the idea of bringing people and ideas together seems unimaginable. But if there is a consensus about anything, it is this: Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev -- the man who brought an end to the Cold War, made democratic elections possible and yesterday declared his intention to run for president -- stands virtually no chance of being the people's choice in the presidential election.

Paris. -- Francois Mitterrand, who quit political life yesterday, passing France's presidential powers to Jacques Chirac, has been the most interesting Western political figure of his generation.The great figures who preceded his generation, DeGaulle, Churchill, Roosevelt, Adenauer, Monnet, as well as his younger contemporary, Mikhail Gorbachev, all left their countries fundamentally changed. They won wars, saved national honor, liquidated empires, launched political unions. Mr. Mitterrand left France changed, obviously -- but with nothing fundamental changed that would not, in one way or the other, have changed without him.He is an artist-politician, like DeGaulle and Churchill (and Vaclav Havel)

Wim Wenders, the critically acclaimed German director of "Wings of Desire" and "Paris, Texas," will introduce his new film, "Faraway, So Close," at the Senator Theatre at 7:30 tonight.Mr. Wenders will also answer questions after the screening, the film's Maryland debut."Faraway, So Close," which won the Grand Jury Prize at the 1993 Cannes Film Festival, is the sequel to 1987's "Wings of Desire," which Mr. Wenders wrote in collaboration with German poet Peter Handke.Mr. Wenders "is one of the most cerebral of contemporary directors," says Senator owner Tom Kiefaber, who points to "his inspired choice of subject matter and the talented team of professionals he has assembled for his productions."

Gary Hart can't get no respect. And he is looking for it in all the wrong places.Hart, former U.S. senator and failed presidential candidate, whined to the New Yorker magazine last week that he had finally figured out the difference between his escapades and Bill Clinton's escapades:"They say Clinton handled his situation better than I did. Poppycock. It wasn't the decision to go on '60 Minutes.' It was the editorial decision not to pursue it any further. I didn't see editors this time sending reporters halfway around the world to peek in a politician's window."

Paris. -- There are always attempts to go back in the course of a revolution. They always fail. That will be true of yesterday's coup in Moscow, but it is not a consideration that offers much consolation to the people swept up in a crisis that may end in sanguinary violence.The only restorations of an ancien regime that succeed are those put in place by foreign powers after crushing a revolution by military conquest. After Napoleon the allies put Louis XVIII back on the throne. He lasted 15 years.

What kind of new Soviet Union will emerge from the travail of seven days that shook the world? No one knows the answer to that question, but we could envision the following scenario:The first order of business is the signing of the new union treaty, which was the precipitating factor in the last desperate attempt of the old central bureaucracy to hold onto privilege and power. In fact, the treaty should be amended to bestow even greater power on the republics which have entered the treaty, placing them roughly in the same position as the American states.

"If we had all followed the path that Czechoslovakia began, avoiding distortions and extremes, I think . . . the world would be different, and it wouldn't be so hard to implement these changes now."Mikhail Gorbachev, on the death of Alexander Dubcek.London. -- Anything Mikhail Gorbachev says these days must be taken with a large grain of salt, for he is not settling gracefully into his historic role as the last president of the Soviet Union. He still dreams of a political comeback.Fresh predictions of disaster (including many by Mr. Gorbachev himself)

SOUND & FURY: THE WASHINGTON PUNDITOCRACY AND THE COLLAPSE OF AMERICAN POLITICS.Eric Alterman.HarperCollins.353 pages. $23.George Orwell, the saturnine British journalist and author of "Animal Farm," said political rhetoric was designed "to give an appearance of solidity to wind." In the view of critic and academician Eric Alterman, few ideological blowhards have huffed and puffed as much or done more damage than the elite corps of opinion-mongers he calls the "punditocracy."His savagely witty and incisive "Sound & Fury" details how this select group of column writers and television pontificators came into being, and offers a radical proposal for effecting their ouster, or at least neutralization, in order to revitalize both our press and political process.