ABSTRACT
George Breslauer's article on Mikhail Gorbachev's leadership qualities is an extremely stimulating, formidably argued matching of theory against practice. Historians might reckon that such a tragedy could have been avoided if, for example, Gorbachevs leadership strategy had been less radical. The danger is that Gorbachev may, despite his minimal domestic authority, cling to office by trying to use his declining and increasingly uncertain power before it becomes completely unusable. Gorbachevs popular authority, i.e., popular approval of him, has sunk from 52 percent in December 1989 to 21 percent in October 1990. Conservative Leninists increasingly view Gorbachev as having passively allowed an anti-communist revolution to begin. The main political threat that Gorbachev has felt from the right has come from the military conservatives. Evidently more worrying to Gorbachev than this, though potentially connected to it, has been the growing militancy of respected military leaders like his personal advisor and former Chief of the General Staff, Sergey Akhromeyev.
