JANE L. CURRY (Santa Clara, CA, U.S.A.) GORBACHEV'S REVOLUTION : ANOTHER LOOK AT THE POTEMKIN VILLAGE OF COMMUNISM* The changes wrought in both the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the initial five years of the Gorbachev era were un- deniably more dramatic and deeper than those of virtually any other five years in history. They have been called, in popular and scholarly writings, a "Revolution." But, the real past from which they come and their very nature make them not a revolution but a continuation, if a bizarre one, of the past. The irony, though, is that the end result of these non-revolutions has rewritten the map of Europe; in all likelihood, permanently changed, if not revolutionized, the rules if not the lives of millions of people who lived in what were once "Communist" societies; and forced scholars to rethink their past assumptions. From the beginning, these were events that proved the "domino theory" was true but in reverse-that the Soviet Bloc was so interknit that reforms in one nation could not help but bring changes in others. They were also events that proved the Soviet KGB right: clearly "loyalty" to Communism, after decades, was more a learned response to fear than it real. Amd, finally, they ;xrere e'lents that led from the same priorities that had motivated the Brezhnev leadership. The same priorities that had motivated the Brezhnev leadership. The difference was that there was a new world system, where the Soviet Union was not able to win with bellicosity but had to win with its civility. The other actors had new and greater resources in their economies and communications systems. It was not, in short, a bipolar world in which the Soviets were one of the two superpowers. Instead, it was a multipolar world where the Soviet Union could do little by itself or without the West. * I am grateful for the assistance of William W. Duffy III and Jennifer Salinger during the writing of this article.