TOMSK in Siberia is an unexpectedly pleasant place, tire streets of intricately carved houses shaped from the timber of the huge virgin forests which surround the city. It gas here in what, for the area, was a "mild" winter's day of minus 30 degrees celsius that the deep animosity of the Russian people towards the last president of the Soviet Union was most vividly brought home to me.
Sergei Ivanovich was an elderly man who drove me around town in his Volga sedan. Strangely, he refused to reveal his surname. It was, he said, something that brought shame on him and on his family. I played a guessing game. Perhaps he was Sergei Ivanovich Rasputin, or even Chikatilo, the name of the mass murderer and cannibal from Rostov who was very much in the news at the time.
Finally, when it was time to leave for Moscow and we approached the airport in a blizzard, Sergei Ivanovich relented on the condition that I would not tell anyone else. "My name," he said in muted tones, "is Sergei Ivanovich Gorbachev."
To westerners, Gorbachev is the man who ended the Cold War, ensured the demolition of the Berlin wall and ushered in a new era of openness in the Soviet Union.
For Russians, his dithering over reforms, his alleged swing to the right during the winter of 1990-1991 in which he, as President, held the ultimate responsibility for the deaths of 14 demonstrators in Vilnius, alienated him from intellectuals. His earlier anti alcohol campaign had embedded a fierce hostility in the minds of the ordinary Russian voter and was compounded by the perception that he alone was to blame for the relegation of Russia to the second division of world powers.
Having listened to the President's waffling and long winded answers to straightforward questions at many of his press conferences in the Foreign Ministry auditorium on Zubovsky Boulevard and later at the Gorbachev Institute on Leningradsky Prospekt, this reviewer occasionally became tempted towards the Russian rather than the western appraisal.
Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev's memoirs are indeed long, but not as long winded as might have been expected. They spring few surprises other than the revelation that he appears to have known of the attempted coup of 1991 on the night of Sunday August 18th in his Crimean holiday home, when the rest of the world was blithely unaware of what was happening.
Although destined in the main for Western readers who see him positively, the memoirs frequently lapse into long tracts of self justification and hitter attacks on his arch enemy, Boris Yeltsin.
On the Vilnius events he rightly points out that the decision to storm the TV tower, with its resultant loss of life, was not his. It was taken by men such as Boris Pugo, Vladimir Kryuchkov and Dmitri Yazov. But they were all Gorbachev's men and remained so after Vilnius and until they turned on him in the coup eight months later. "At that time, I trusted Yazov," is a typically pathetic comment.
Gorbachev's judgment of the character of others was perhaps his greatest weakness and one which is amply portrayed in the book. He was devastated by the betrayal of his trusted friend and college mate Anatoly Lukyanov, who plotted the August coup. Vladimir Shcherbitsky, the Ukrainian party boss, who brought out his own grandchildren for the May Day parade in Kiev in 1986 - five days after the Chernobyl disaster fifty miles away in a publicity stunt to cover up the radiation danger, is described as "one of the decent people".
The Polish party leader General Wojtech Jartizelski was, in Gorbachev's words, "a true patriot, a friend of the Soviet Union, a moral person, a leading politician, a man with many human virtues". It should be said, however, that no such praise is given to Nicolae Ceausescu of Romania or to the former East German party leader Erich Honeker.
Boris Yeltsin, too, was brought to prominence by Gorbachev, a decision which the memoirs clearly show that he now regrets. The bitterness towards the current Russian president which oozes from the pages is matched, and perhaps surpassed, only by the bitterness towards Gorbachev in Yeltsin's own memoirs, Against the Grain and A view from the Kremlin.
In a world of sound bites, where image is more important than fact, where shadow outweighs substance, it is possible to understand why Gorbachev's indecisiveness on the Vilnius crisis made a greater negative impact than Yeltsin's belligerence which led to the deaths of tens of thousands in Chechnya, and to understand why Yeltsin received the support of 35 per cent of the electorate in June against Gorbachev's 0.5 per cent.
THE Gorbachev memoirs, however, are likely to be of greater importance to historians than either of the Yeltsin volumes. His description of dealings with world leaders, his portrayal of internal Kremlin politics, along with an invaluable glossary and short biographies of the leading characters, provided by Martin McCauley of the University of London, are the book's strongest points.
His meetings with and his opinions on leaders such as Reagan, Bush, Mitterrand and others are detailed as well as anecdotal, and more objective than his recollections of more recent events and personalities in his native land.
But in the current political situation in Russia, in which President Yeltsin is sidelined through illness and will be further sidelined in the recuperation period after heart surgery, Gorbachev's descriptions of the machinations in the Kremlin when first Brezhnev and later Andropov and Chernenko were incapacitated through illness, make for illustrative reading.
The intrigue which took place in those days, the daggers implanted on the backs of colleagues as sectional power was ruthlessly sought, are likely to be going on at present. Mr Yeltsin, after all, has been no more far sighted in his choice of those who surround him than has Mr Gorbachev.
