Few people have had such a profound influence on the course of history as has the last President of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) -- Mikhail Gorbachev. The West has gloried him. The residual elements of the East have castigated and deplored the cascading effect of administrative destruction that he triggered off with his ideas, convictions and efforts. There are three sides to this story -- the West's, the East's and that of the man concerned.

Gorbachev has voiced his thoughts earlier in 'Perestroika and Soviet-American Relations', 'The Search for a New Beginning: Developing a New Civilization', and 'The August Coup: The Truth and the Lessons'. 'On My Country and the World' in a way summarises his previous writings from a more personal angle. He organises his thoughts in three sections: The October Revolution: Its Sense and Significance; The Union Could Have Been Preserved; and The New Thinking: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow.

Given the prevalent situation in Russia in 1917, Gorbachev says, the October Revolution was historically inevitable and that it reflected the most urgent demands of the broadest strata of the people for social change. He endorse Karl Marx's dictum that revolutions are the locomotives of history, but calls for its rethinking. He wonders whether revolutions have also become extreme solutions to situations in which ruling powers are incapable of solving problems that come to a head while the people are no longer able to endure the situation.

Though vehicles of great change, revolutions have become costly too. The same oppressed and exploited masses for whom revolutions were supposed to be festivals, were precisely the ones of suffer. He points out that revolutions have been followed by retrogressive movements, and argues that the optimum form of social development can be evolutionary reform. The outcome depends on the level of maturity of civil society, the degree of responsibility among ruling circles and a consensus to renounce intolerance and extremism.

Gorbachev criticises the model of socialism that the Bolsheviks chose, and says Marx and Frederick Engels themselves did not deliberately work out a detailed blueprint of the future of socialist society since they did not believe in recipes. Bolshevik socialism was a crudely schematic model based on ideological principles and standards that could not stand close examination. Under Josef Stalin's doctrine of intolerance and ruthless suppression of those who did not fall in the line, these became harsh and dogmatic.

The Marxian principle of "dictatorship of the proletariat" was carried beyond absurdity. Lenin himself, he says, had written that the proletariat cannot conquer power in any way except through democracy. What transpired was a dictatorship by a small group and a nomenklatura that served it. There were other breaks from democracy too: banning of non-Communist parties; curtailment of freedom of expression; and introduction of a one-party system. The fundamental cause for the weakening of the Soviet system was the growing gap between the government and its citizens.

The Soviet Union did become industrialised very fast, but quality was compromised in the paranoid race to overtake the West. Collectivisation, just another form of serfdom, destroyed the countryside. Alternatives like those suggested by Nikolai Bukharin were condemned. The achievements were there, but as he says, "The high cost of what was achieved was because of the system. The results achieved were because of the self-sacrificing labour of our people." The advancement in social and cultural spheres were far superior to those in any other country.

Yet, Gorbachev, a university student at the time of Stalin's death, says "The desire to say farewell to him in his casket was a very intense one." All that had to change for any perestroika to begin. "To set about making reforms meant, above all, overcoming the Stalin within." Nikita Khrushchev was a precursor to perestroika; he was the first to give an impetus to a reform process that could develop further and only succeed as a democratic process. The problem was that he had is contradictions, the product that he essentially was of a Stalinist school. But he had set the ball rolling. Stalinism could not return even during the Leonid Brezhnev era.

Gorbachev admits everything was not thought out at the beginning of perestroika. The idea was to carry out fundamental ideas that had been advanced by the October Revolution but not been realised. What he did not grasp then was that there was a need to penetrate the system to its very foundation and change it, not merely refine or perfect it. The transition was both difficult and complicated since the totalitarian system possessed tremendous inertia and there was resistance from the party and government structures that were part of it.

Perestroika eliminated the foundations of a totalitarian system and democratic changes began. This was possible only because of a critical rethinking of all realities -- both national and international. Without glasnost -- which helped explain and promote awareness of the new realities and the essence of the new political course -- there would have been no perestroika. Glasnost not only created conditions for implementing the reforms, it was also possible to overcome attempts to sabotage the entire process of change.

The process of perestroika could not achieve all its goals as the emphasis had been on political reform. Economic change lagged behind political change. The delay in solving the nationalities question did not make things easier. Boris Yeltsin's intrigues only made it worse. The Soviet Union perished but it offers lessons to other countries too. Russia did not when it departed from the path of evolutionary reforms to that of, what Gorbachev calls, "shock therapy".

It is not that market economies have been grand successes, particularly on social and environmental counts. While these economies increased productivity, unemployment remains their basic defect. This can be undone only by a revision of present-day dogmas regarded as the "indisputable laws of development" and by means of a rational social policy. The present system of economic management based on the pursuit of profits destroys nature too.

It would be wrong, asserts Gorbachev, to heap all ills and misfortunes suffered by the Soviet people on socialism since the socialism that great thinkers had dreamt about never existed. The socialist idea has neither list its political significance or its historic relevance. The socialist idea remains inextinguishable since its continues to inspire people to take action in the name of everything it contained: natural human rights and freedom. This must, however, be approached in a modern way by taking into account the experiences accumulated and the challenges and requirements of the future.

Previous conceptions of socialism were flawed since they were constructed as antipodes to the "model" of capitalist society. But the terms capitalism and socialism no longer understand or describe reality. Gorbachev advocates the approach towards socialism not as a closed social formation, but as a set of values. All traditional ideologies have become vulnerable today. The former USSR president calls for a new conceptual vision for the future: global humanism.

Gorbachev asserts that no one person, party or political tendency has a monopoly on solving the problems that face humanity today. He says the roots of the crisis of contemporary civilisation lie in the profound separation from the genuine interests of humanity. He says, "We are talking of a transition toward a new civilisation. No one knows what it will be like. What is important is to orient in that direction."

There, of course, are lessons to be learnt. The first, he points out, is that "the assertion of the ideas of humanism and democracy, even in a society burdened with the heritage of totalitarianism is fully realistic". Next, "policymaking must play a decisive role in implementing change. But these must be policies that are linked with moral principles and serve the cause of humanism". And lastly, Gorbachev says, "genuinely progressive, democratic change is possible only if it does not remain the province of a small group in the top echelons of society, only if it becomes a genuine concern of the people as a whole and of public opinion in the broadest sense".