GRAPEVINE

By DAVID ELLIS

Mikhail Gorbachev may hold out hope for the return of perestroika, but he won't be getting much encouragement. "Among Gorbachev's top advisers, just about everybody is gone," claims John Mroz, president of the Institute for East-West Security Studies. Many other reform-minded leaders have left the country altogether. The latest departure: Boris Fyodorov, the respected finance minister of the Russian republic, who will take up a job in London later this month at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. Most of Gorbachev's policy shapers have been replaced by unknowns from the Central Committee's ideology department. Before their arrival, some of these new advisers purportedly helped draft a secret memorandum last summer that became the blueprint for the January military crackdown in Lithuania. The classified memo surfaced in Nezavisimaya Gazeta, a new liberal daily newspaper that has been tolerated despite the general ebbing of glasnost that has occurred in the state-run electronic media.

With reporting by DANIEL S. LEVY