DIPLOMACY : Soviet Turmoil Takes Shine Off Gorbachev Peace Prize

By MICHAEL PARKS

May 31, 1991 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

MOSCOW — With his country’s economy collapsing and his leadership under continual challenge, Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev may appear a flawed choice when he formally receives the Nobel Peace Prize next week in Oslo.

Caricatured at home and abroad in recent weeks as begging for Western money to underwrite the Soviet Union’s troubled political and economic reforms, Gorbachev now seems far from the confident world hero whose appearances on the streets of New York, Berlin and Rome brought cheers of “Gorby, Gorby!”

And his chances for turning the Soviet Union into a modern industrialized democracy--the goal of perestroika --has become a question that increasingly worries Western leaders.

Almost forgotten in all of Gorbachev’s troubles in the 7 1/2 months since he was named as the 1990 Nobel Peace laureate are the ways in which he changed the world. Where other statesmen have inspired people with their visions of a peaceful future and been thusly honored with the Nobel Prize, for six years Gorbachev has acted:

* Breaking the shackles of Stalinism, he freed his own nation from the totalitarianism that imprisoned its people for decades.

* He ended Soviet socialism as a model for other countries, not just in Eastern Europe but much of the Third World, and effectively freed the people of most of those countries, as well.

* Recognizing the right of every nation to self-determination, Gorbachev actively encouraged the democratization of Eastern Europe, even though it broke up the protective chain of satellites Moscow had maintained since World War II. He similarly accepted Germany’s right to national unity and became the key, next to Chancellor Helmut Kohl, to the unification of East and West Germany.

* In eight U.S.-Soviet summit meetings, Gorbachev worked with Presidents Bush and Reagan to turn the superpower relations away from hostility toward what both sides now describe as a partnership promoting peace.

* Seeing the arms race as not only unwinnable but unaffordable, Gorbachev offered critical concessions for a treaty that has now eliminated intermediate-range, land-based nuclear missiles, the first time a class of nuclear weapons has been scrapped. Agreements are near on implementation of a treaty reducing conventional forces in Europe and on a U.S.-Soviet treaty reducing by a third the superpowers’ nuclear arsenals.

* In the Third World, Gorbachev withdrew Soviet forces from Afghanistan; sided with the United States against Iraq, an old Soviet ally, during the Gulf crisis and worked to resolve regional conflicts in Namibia, Angola, Cambodia and Central America that had been fed by the old East-West rivalry.

As Margaret Thatcher, the former British prime minister, observed during a visit to Moscow this week: “If you had told me 10 or even five years ago what vast changes lay ahead, I would not have believed them even possible.” Gorbachev did not do it all by himself, she said, “but without him none of it would have been done--none of it.”

Gorbachev did not set out to end the Cold War or heal the breach between East and West but to restore his own nation.

First came the recognition that the Soviet Union as a political and economic system was not working, then the realization that it could not be fixed, short of fundamental changes, and finally the admission that, whether as a system or an ideology, it should not be spread, certainly not by force.

The Nobel Legacy

* Nobel Prizes are awarded under the will of Alfred Bernhard Nobel, Swedish chemist, engineer and inventor of dynamite who died in 1896.

* Distribution of prizes began 1901.

* Peace Prize awarded by a committee of five elected by Norwegian Storting, or Parliament.

* Original Nobel bequeath for all prizes was $9 million; amount of each prize varies with income from fund.

* Gorbachev Peace Prize will be worth $715,000. He has said the money will go to charity.

Peace Prize Winners

1990: Mikhail S. Gorbachev, Soviet Union

1989: Dalai Lama, Tibet

1988: U.N. Peacekeeping Forces

1987: Oscar Arias Sanchez, Costa Rica

1986: Elie Wiesel, United States