From the Managing Editor

By Henry Muller

"I know it's Gorbachev. Who else could it be?" How many times we have heard those words in the past few months from friends and colleagues -- even a few competitors -- trying to guess our annual secret. While the choice of the Soviet President may not astonish many readers, one aspect of the decision was a bigger secret than usual. Among ourselves, we referred to it as "the D factor." Instead of naming Mikhail Gorbachev Man of the Year for 1989, we decided to designate him Man of the Decade. The only precedent for such a departure from the Y word occurred at the end of 1949, when Winston Churchill was TIME's Man of the Half-Century.

Since 1927, when TIME named Charles Lindbergh its first Man of the Year, the guiding principle has been to identify the person who, for better or for worse, has had the most impact on the year's events. And we stress: for better or for worse. The Man of the Year is not our version of the Nobel Peace Prize nor an attempt at canonization. It is a news judgment. Some subjects have been men of peace, like the Mahatma Gandhi (1930) and Martin Luther King Jr. (1963). Others have been evil, like Joseph Stalin (1939 and 1942) and Adolf Hitler (1933). We have also had several Women of the Year, including Queen Elizabeth II and, for 1986, President Corazon Aquino of the Philippines.

This year, as world attention ricocheted from the stirrings of democracy in the U.S.S.R. to the massacre in Beijing and the peaceful revolts in Eastern Europe, it became clear that we were witnessing a sequence of events that began well before 1989 and whose impact would extend into the next decade, perhaps the next century. Somehow, confining our choice to 1989 seemed inadequate, and thus we named Gorbachev Man of the Decade. The project was coordinated by editor at large Strobe Talbott and Brigid O'Hara-Forster, chief researcher of the World section.

It is Gorbachev's second appearance. He was Man of the Year for 1987, when he emerged as a symbol of hope for a new kind of Soviet Union. He is only the third non-American to have been so designated more than once. One was Churchill, who was also Man of the Year for 1940. The other two were, like Gorbachev, communists: Stalin and China's Deng Xiaoping (1978 and 1985). Will Gorbachev make it again? Stay with us as we embark on a new decade that promises to be anything but dull.