A New Faith

By Brigid O''Hara-Forster

GORBACHEV by Dusko Doder and Louise Branson

Viking; 450 pages; $24.95

"I am a communist, a convinced communist. For some that may be fantasy but for me it is my main goal." For those who follow the travails of Mikhail Gorbachev, that forthright credo, proclaimed last December, is increasingly shadowed by questions of apostasy. Is this guardian of Marxism really a true believer or the architect of a final loss of faith?

That paramount question of our times underlies a new biography by Dusko Doder and Louise Branson, who served in Moscow for the Washington Post and the London Sunday Times respectively. They have produced a compelling study of the mysterious, almost biological process by which power is accumulated in the Soviet system and of the figure who has most notably mastered this art.

+ Their thorough reporting produces a portrait of a leader who "was changing in front of the nation's eyes" as he confronted the hugeness of the task facing his crumbling empire. Shortly after taking power, Doder and Branson report, Gorbachev embraced an aide's suggestion that he study Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People; as a result, his public style was transformed. He abandoned the cant of Marxism and brusquely told opponents to "get out of the way."

His early hopes of galvanizing a revolution from below gave way to an exasperated recognition that his revolution would, after all, have to come from above. Having vowed fealty to the party's monopoly on power, he swiftly turned around and presided over its abandonment. In its place, he built a structure of government with himself at the pinnacle. The result is the central paradox of his rule: "The more he sought to disperse power, the more he found it necessary to concentrate power in his own hands." But as Doder and Branson point out, "Russia is a country that fervently needs an ideology, a set of beliefs, a religion." Much of the dogma that has shaped the past seven decades of Soviet life has already been abandoned, but what new faith will Mikhail Gorbachev offer his people?