For insight into one of the 20th century's pivotal figures, the end of the Cold War or the events leading to the collapse of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev's voluminous memoirs have disappointingly little to offer.
But if you want to know what the last Soviet leader REALLY thinks about his longtime rival, Boris Yeltsin, the search is almost worthwhile: Overly ambitious. Lusts for power. Hypocrite. Plunderer. Destroyer by nature. And, of course, that legendary fondness for the bottle."Memoirs," Gorbachev's autobiography published in English this week (Bantam-Doubleday, $35), runs to 700 pages but says little or nothing new about some of the defining events of the last decade.
Rather, it's another installment in Gorbachev's effort to refurbish his image, especially in Russia where he is so despised for the loss of superpower status and the pain caused by his hesitant economic reforms that more people voted for "none of the above" than him in the summer presidential elections.
But in this labyrinth of rehashed speeches and events already on the public record, Gorbachev does try to even the score with Yeltsin, the Russian leader who led the resistance to the August 1991 Soviet coup and then engineered his humiliating resignation four months later.
Gorbachev says he didn't know much about Yeltsin when he brought the Siberian to Moscow in 1985 to head the Communist Party's construction department.
But what he did know - that Yeltsin didn't handle criticism well and reportedly had a fondness for drink - "put me on my guard." Their relationship went downhill from there.
Gorbachev says:
-Yeltsin couldn't cope with his new job as Communist Party boss for Moscow. "Completely forgetting his calls for democracy . . . Yeltsin even then showed that he was not a real reformer."
-Yeltsin's highly publicized campaign in Moscow against perks and privileges for the elite was a sham. In power, Yeltsin "allowed his associates to indulge in corruption and privileges such as the Communist nomenclature had never dreamed of."
-Soon after Yeltsin was ousted from the Moscow post in 1987, he faked a suicide attempt using scissors. "The doctors said the wound was not critical at all; the scissors, by slipping over his ribs, had left a bloody but superficial wound."
-Yeltsin refused to come to Gorbachev's office on Dec. 25, 1991, to accept control of the Soviet nuclear arsenal and the decree dissolving the Soviet Union. Instead he wanted to meet in Catherine Hall, where talks with foreign leaders are held.
"Thus even in the first minutes after stepping down I was faced with impudence and a lack of courtesy. Ensuing events proved that this action, rather than an isolated backlash of Yeltsin's feelings of revenge, was part of the policy he had adapted towards me."
Despite their differences, the book makes no reference to Yelt-sin's crucial role in crushing the coup.
It also ignores or treats superficially other key events during Gorbachev's seven years in office, including the abrupt 1990 resignation of Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, who warned that dictatorship was stalking the Kremlin.