In December, 1988, when Mikhail S. Gorbachev last visited the United States, he enjoyed the overwhelming support of the Soviet people. A national survey had just named him the most popular person in the Soviet Union, and almost 90% of the deputies in the People's Congress had supported his bid for the chairmanship of the Parliament.

This week, Gorbachev is coming to America under radically different circumstances. Although his popularity in the West has remained high, the majority of the Soviet people now view him with suspicion and anger. In a recent poll, only one-third of the Soviet people nominated him as the most popular man of the year, and less than two-thirds of the People's Deputies voted in favor of his becoming president.

At a Moscow watch factory, less than two-thirds of the party members supported Gorbachev as their delegate to the upcoming Communist Party Congress. Workers from the Urals were far from friendly to him during their recent meetings, and he received a cool welcome from the Congress of Young Communists, whose meeting was televised in April. Finally, the events during this year's May Day parade confirmed the outrage that the masses feel toward Gorbachev. After five years of \o7 perestroika,\f7 the vast majority of the Soviets consider their lives more miserable now than during Leonid I. Brezhnev's "period of stagnation."

But are the Soviet people really being fair to Gorbachev? Yes and no. Of course, Gorbachev and his team are directly responsible for many of the evils currently bedeviling the Soviet people, particularly the inflation that for the first time is wreaking havoc on the Soviet economy.

The list of Kremlin actions and policies deemed misguided, if not downright wrong, is embarrassingly long. Still, despite the failures, the Soviet people's opinion of Gorbachev seems rather harsh, although it's not surprising, given the changes currently being experienced in the Soviet Union. Great American innovators such as Washington, Lincoln and Roosevelt also faced intense public criticism when they broke from tradition and called for radical social change.

Although some of those now turning their backs on Gorbachev are liberals, and some are leftist radicals (Soviet terminology for advocates of capitalism), the majority of those expressing discontent are "conservatives." Their ranks include millions of ordinary people who, afraid of an open market, preferred Brezhnev's stagnation, with its low morale and work ethic, to Gorbachev's dynamism.