EUROPE : Gorbachev: Forgotten, but Not Gone

The lonely figure of Mikhail S. Gorbachev exits unnoticed from the VIP arrival lounge to a single black Volga idling on the airport tarmac here in the gathering dusk of a late-spring evening.

Before he ducks into the chauffeured sedan that is a perquisite of his hopeless bid to regain the presidency, he turns to wave toward the terminal, although no one is watching.

Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Time magazine’s Man of the Decade. A name once synonymous with hope and freedom. The revered object of Gorbymania. Liberator of millions.

History may judge the 65-year-old Gorbachev more justly, but in his own country the father of perestroika and glasnost is a nobody.

And as he perseveres through insults and indifference in a quixotic quest to win back Russia’s highest office, even admirers of one of the most influential political leaders of this century say he has lost touch with reality and succumbed to an undignified end.

“Perhaps he would not be a bad alternative, but he has no chance,” observed noted writer and former dissident Vladimir N. Voinovich. “People here not only don’t support him. They hate him.”

Communists resent Gorbachev for breaking their 70-year monopoly on power and turning on the party that bestowed upon him its highest post.

Nationalists despise the former president for the liberalization that allowed pieces of the empire to proclaim independence, destroying the superpower Soviet Union and loosening its stranglehold on Eastern Europe.

Democrats sometimes credit Gorbachev with dismantling the dictatorship that held the Soviet Union together. But they also tend to hold him responsible for the social and economic collapse that followed.

He may have initiated the reform process, they reason, but he made a mess of it.

Undaunted by polls that give him no more than 1% support from the electorate, Gorbachev insisted in an interview that the Russian people are coming back to his side.

“The situation is changing for the better. Until the autumn of 1993, people seemed to have forgotten about Gorbachev,” said the once-celebrated leader, who often refers to himself in the third person. “Our people needed time to decide whether Gorbachev had been right or not. . . . Now they know.”

He has been spat at, slapped and heckled on the hustings but dismisses those incidents as unrepresentative of Russian public opinion.

He has been counseled by well-intentioned supporters--including his wife, Raisa--to avoid a doomed drive for power but rejects that advice as pessimistic and shortsighted.

He has been virtually ignored by the media he freed from decades of Communist censorship but attributes the snubbing silence to new pressures being applied by unscrupulous opponents.

“Do not forget that Gorbachev is the chief competitor for the two main camps in the election,” he said of incumbent President Boris N. Yeltsin and Communist Party challenger Gennady A. Zyuganov. “That is why they report seemingly low ratings for me. They block and distort information about me.”

That at least five other longshot candidates separate him from the two front-runners in most polls does not register in his calculations.

“It’s sad. He’s like an aging beauty queen who can’t believe she’s lost the power to attract,” said a Western diplomat who served in Moscow during Gorbachev’s heyday a decade ago. “He has already achieved global fame. He has already been president. I don’t see what he will get out of this other than humiliation.”

Some say he is seeking vindication for the myriad troubles his compatriots have heaped on his reputation.

Some say he wants revenge against Yeltsin for toppling him from the Kremlin pinnacle and hijacking the democratic revolution.

Others speculate that he is simply indulging an ego fanned by the adoration and accolades he became accustomed to when he was arguably the most fascinating figure on the world stage.

“I would not mind if Gorbachev returned to power,” said Vadim V. Bakatin, the former KGB chief appointed by Gorbachev after the failed 1991 coup against him. “But it is absolutely impossible. Gorbachev will fail dramatically.”