GORBACHEV CLINGS TO HIS ROOTS.(Perspective)

Byline: David Remnick

M OSCOW - "The past is never dead," William Faulkner said. "It's not even past."

Mikhail Gorbachev has always seemed to understand that and has steadily opened the gruesome chapters of Soviet history for a painful national reading. But until an extraordinary speech this month, he has described his own past only reluctantly. And when the time came to speak frankly, the revolutionary used the moment to underscore the limits of his rebellion.

"Look at my two grandfathers," Gorbachev told a gathering of intellectuals. "One was denounced for not fulfilling the sowing plan in 1933, a year when half the family died of hunger. They took him away to Irkutsk to a timber-producing camp, and the rest of the …