Blood on his hands .sx If reform is finished under Gorbachev , the West should be looking for a better man to help .sx IT IS a January for the history books .sx In the rain-drenched sands of northern Arabia a great question is being put to the test .sx Are the Arabs to be dominated by men like Saddam Hussein , or can they at last be helped to break out into a freer and more rational future ?sx On frosty Baltic streets another great question seems to be getting a coldly unwelcome answer .sx No , Mikhail Gorbachev is not , unless he swiftly proves otherwise , the potential saviour of the Soviet Union , and therefore not a man the free world should wish to support .sx The Gorbachev test has always been fairly simple .sx The first part of the test was whether Mr Gorbachev would change the politics and economics of his country radically enough to create a better life for the people who live in it .sx The second part was whether he would tell his diplomats and generals to do the things the western democracies hoped they would do .sx There was nothing cynical about this second part , so long as it does not involve shutting one's eyes to what is happening inside the Soviet Union .sx Alas , unless Mr Gorbachev reverses what has happened in the Baltic countries in the past week , it will seem clear that he has failed on the first count , the need for fundamental change at home ; and that his usefulness to the West , though it has not ended , is getting steadily smaller , and will soon no longer justify any attempt at closed eyes .sx On the home front , every component of what used to be Gorbachevism is a casualty .sx Glasnost lies wounded :sx Moscow television has reverted to mere propaganda on the Baltic issue ; the excellent Interfax news service survives only because it is now under the protection of Boris Yeltsin and the Russian republic ; Mr Gorbachev has talked of suspending all press freedom :sx Perestroika is a stretcher-case :sx after almost six years of failure by Mr Gorbachev to make the leap to a market economy , the man he this week appointed as his new prime minister , Valentin Pavlov , probably does not even understand what that leap would involve .sx The tanks in Vilnius may have crushed the hope of a looser Soviet confederation .sx For all the good things Mr Gorbachev has done since 1985 , too much of his country's old communist apparatus is still in place .sx The Soviet Union , at bottom , remains unrestructured .sx Mr Gorbachev cannot clear himself by saying it was all the fault of an excitable general in Vilnius .sx That is most unlikely to be true :sx the timing of the army's entry into Vilnius , just before the climax of the Gulf crisis , bears the master-politician's stamp .sx The plea of ignorance would anyway mean that Mr Gorbachev had lost control of the army , in which case the near-dictatorial powers he demanded and got last month from his parliament become meaningless .sx Mr Gorbachev can make himself respectable again in only one way .sx He can say the Baltic intervention was a mistake , punish any officers who clearly exceeded their instructions , and return matters in the Baltic countries to where they were before last week :sx which means evacuating the occupied buildings , pulling out the paratroops , and leaving the Balts in their previous constitutional limbo , neither independent states nor fully part of the Soviet Union .sx This is unlikely to happen .sx But , if it does not happen , Mr Gorbachev will have lost most of his old claim to admiration .sx He will be trying to preserve the Soviet Union in its present shape and size at the cost of putting political and economic liberalisation into the freezer .sx It is likely to stay in the freezer for a long time , since the allies Mr Gorbachev will need to keep the union intact are mostly enemies of liberalisation .sx He may have acted as he did because the reactionaries frightened him into it .sx More likely , he never really understood how big a change that liberalisation requires .sx He never restructured himself .sx Either way , he will no longer be the Gorbachev people thought he was .sx No longer Mr Essential .sx Western democrats must then decide whether Mr Gorbachev's foreign-policy usefulness makes it necessary to ignore this fact .sx If the forthcoming battle in Arabia goes quickly and well , the answer will pretty clearly be no .sx A year ago the world thought it needed Mr Gorbachev for the liberation of Eastern Europe .sx That job is done , apart from some unfinished business in the Balkans ; the only other loose end is the Soviet garrison in eastern Germany , and no sane government in Moscow , Gorbachev or post-Gorbachev , is going to leave the best part of its army to disintegrate abroad .sx Since August Mr Gorbachev has been immensely helpful in building up the coalition against Saddam Hussein .sx That help is still welcome , to steady the Arab part of the coalition when the fighting starts ; but it is not indispensable , and when the fight is over it will not be needed at all .sx The foreign usefulness of Mr Gorbachev will then be reduced to his blessing for the two great arms-control deals , nuclear and conventional , that he has worked out with the West .sx It would indeed be a pity to lose these agreements , especially the clauses that entitle the democracies to go and peer inside the Soviet military establishment .sx Yet the stern fact is that the continuing disintegration of the Soviet economy - which will get worse , the longer reform is put off - is going to make almost any Soviet government want to spend less on arms .sx It will therefore want the West to spend less too .sx The arms deals may thus survive .sx If the democracies want to draw back from Mr Gorbachev , this need not stop them .sx They must be clear , however , what they are trying to achieve .sx The aim is not just to express disillusionment with Mr Gorbachev .sx It is to help the emergence of a better Soviet Union .sx A better Soviet Union , let it be repeated , is not only a place in which a genuine free-market democracy can take root .sx It is also a place that will release its grip on those parts of the country which do not want to belong to any Soviet Union , however it is run .sx The events of the past week make it clear that the two aims , pluralism and national freedom , are now inextricably mixed up with each other .sx This helps the democracies to see how they should use the only instrument of persuasion they possess .sx That instrument is the offer of economic help - not just the $1 billion-worth the European Community held out last month , the $3 billion-worth of trade credits America has been talking about , and the even bigger gleam in German eyes , but potentially far more .sx There are few better things for the democracies to spend money on than the right sort of future for the huge stretch of the world that lies east of Poland and Romania .sx But 'the right sort of future' now requires a clear decision from those who might provide the money .sx No help , except perhaps some food aid , should go to a government following Mr Gorbachev's present course .sx The money should be released only to men willing to resume the march to democracy , a free market , the right to independence .sx This might , just possibly , persuade Mr Gorbachev to change his mind .sx If he breaks under the strain , it might help the next Soviet leader to retreat from Mr Gorbachev's mistake .sx But its biggest effect would undoubtedly be to encourage politicians in the component parts of the Soviet Union - above all in its Russian part , half of the whole country - to defy the forces of reaction now in control of the Kremlin .sx It is in Russia that the issue will probably be decided .sx The new Gorbachevism can be beaten if a majority of Russians go on supporting Boris Yeltsin in his opposition to it .sx Only the Russian republic is big enough and economically powerful enough to stand up to the power of the Soviet apparatus , the chief remaining stronghold of the conservatives .sx Only Russian resistance can paralyse the Soviet army , which would mean less danger of civil war .sx In alliance with other unhappy republics , the Russians could yet save the day .sx It is not enough for the democratic world to say that it will withhold aid from the wrong people in what may soon be the ex-Soviet Union .sx It should help the right people , the ones who will try to do better than , alack , Mr Gorbachev has done .sx THE GORBACHEV RECORD .sx The rise and fall of perestroika .sx The crackdown in the Baltic republics has dealt a body-blow to Mikhail Gorbachev's attempts to liberalise and democratise the Soviet Union .sx Where did it all go wrong , and why ?sx " COMRADE democrats .sx ..you have scattered .sx The reformers have gone to ground .sx Dictatorship is coming .sx " Nobody can say he had not been warned .sx When the normally soft-spoken Soviet foreign minister , Edward Shevardnadze , announced his resignation in an emotional speech to the Soviet parliament last month , even he might not have guessed that the six - year odyssey of reform in the Soviet Union was to founder so abruptly , so soon .sx Of the original team who set out on the venture , Mr Shevardnadze was one of the last to quit .sx Of those around Mr Gorbachev now , most have been chosen to confirm his own judgment , not to challenge it .sx Although on paper the most powerful president the Soviet Union has ever had , Mr Gorbachev has seen his political authority ( as opposed to his military clout ) dwindling alarmingly .sx The modern , apparently open - minded man who set out to remake the Soviet Union into a modern , open , competitive superpower now sits brooding in the Kremlin with only his troops to order about ( and even they take violent liberties) .sx He is either out of touch with or resentful of the changes that his reforms have brought .sx How did his endeavour founder ?sx Until recently , the conventional wisdom had it that of the three big reform projects - 'new thinking' abroad and democracy and perestroika at home - Mr Gorbachev had two more or less down and only one to go ( the economy was clearly going to be the hardest of the three) .sx The optimism abroad about Mr Gorbachev's chances was always a bit overdone .sx Now the conventional thinkers must think again .sx Suddenly Mr Gorbachev's achievements look as uncertain as his failures are obvious .sx The world as his mirror .sx This week's appointment of Alexander Bessmertnykh , an avowed 'new thinker' , as Mr Shevardnadze's replacement is a signal from the Kremlin that no foreign-policy reversal is intended .sx It is easy to see why .sx Leaving aside any financial or practical help that Mr Gorbachev may forfeit if he continues his crackdown , his authority at home would have evaporated all the faster , without the change in the image of the Soviet Union over these past six years , from marauding bear on the fringes of Europe to constructive partner in the post-cold-war world .sx Above all , his decision after eight years of bloody and inconclusive war to pull the Soviet army out of Afghanistan pleased not only the Americans , who took it as an earnest of even bigger changes to come , but also many , if not quite all , of his own generals .sx For some time the value of Afghanistan as a place to test the mettle of Soviet soldiers and the reliability of their equipment had been outweighed by the damage being done to army morale by a dirty and unwinnable war .sx The casualties - officially 16,000 dead and 50,000 injured - had begun to take their toll on Soviet society , too .sx A second valuable foreign-policy change was the reduction in 'fraternal assistance' to the third world , from Central America to the Middle East , from Angola to Vietnam .sx Revealing the real cost of such assistance and weighing it against the meagre returns made it easier for the new thinkers in Moscow to argue against the old meddling .sx There was also a new political incentive :sx the greater influence that the Soviet Union was able to win where it could really work to Soviet advantage , in the political and financial councils of the West .sx