Mikhail Gorbachev's case for a "new world order" that would have included a "reforming USSR" doesn't hold water because his Communist Party would still be the sole political arbiter of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics ["Is the world really better off without the USSR?" April 14].

For example, in October 1987, he demonstrated such totalitarian sentiments when he criticized fellow Party member Boris Yeltsin as one who "has put your own ambitions above the interests of the party and of the cause."

In addition, Gorbachev held fast to his policy of glasnost (authorized self-criticism), failing to acknowledge that the correct meaning of openness is otkrovennost.

He illustrated this deception at the Moscow summit in 1988 when he stated: "Our program is more democracy, more glasnost, more social justice with full prosperity and high moral standards."

Finally, he failed to acknowledge that the Cold War really ended, in Western eyes, not with the demise of the USSR in December 1991, but four months earlier.

In August 1991, ordinary Russians, motivated by detente, had assembled in the streets of Moscow and carried out a peaceable revolution, leading President Boris Yeltsin to abolish communism.

Lincoln Landis

Orange