PERSPECTIVEnAmerica Through the Looking GlassnNot so long ago anticommunist conservatives used tonrail against the mirror fallacy, the leftist assumptionnthat the Soviet Union could be studied in Western terms. Ifnonly we could strengthen the hand of the doves andn”responsible” elements, we could keep the country fromnfalling into the hands of the hard-liners and hawks — thenSoviet analogues of Barry Goldwater. After supporting anKGB thug (Andropov) as an urbane. Westernized scotchdrinker,nit was inevitable that Gorbachev be seen as thensavior not only of his country but of the entire world. All thatnwas left was the Nobel Peace Prize — routinely awarded tonbutchers and hypocrites (with a joint award to Le Due Thonand Henry Kissinger, they achieved a double word score).nNow that he has the Norwegian medal of infamy,nGorbachev has carte blanche to proceed with his plans,nwhatever they are, for reconstructing his empire.nBut if it is illegitimate to hold up the U.S.S.R to thenmirror of the U.S.A, the reverse is still a useful exercise, andnby looking at recent events in Eastern Europe, we may benable to learn something about ourselves. To tell the truth, In12/CHRONICLESnby Thomas Flemingnnndon’t know very much about the Soviet Union. Like mostnAmericans who sound off about global conflict, I don’tnknow Russian, and a writer without an adequate grasp of thenlanguage is denied access not only to the newspapers,ndocuments, and conversations that are the stuff of history,nbut also to the vocabulary of the spirit, the grammar andnsyntax of the national character.nMany of my conservative friends seem obsessed with allnthings Soviet in the same way that puritans can be obsessednwith sin. There is a political prurience that leads us to gloatnloathingly over the crimes of Stalin (or Hitler), as we thanknGod we Americans are not like other men. And if conservativesnare prone to overestimate the crimes of Lenin andnStalin — Atilla the Hun or even Shaka Zulu might havenkilled as many, if only they had had the means — some ofnthem are just as ready to overvalue the talents and accomplishmentsnof the Russian people. We hear much of Russiann”spirituality” and of the magnificence of Russian literature.nSolzhenitsyn, before he was unmasked as a religious nationalistnand therefore reactionary, was treated by somen