KONSTANTIN U. CHERNENKO had lain with Soviet gods nary a week when this eminently disposable biography of the Russian Kennedy hurtled headlong towards Gorbachev lovers everywhere

For those aching to be partaking in the instant history of a new finger on the nuclear button, the new hammer banging the Soviet sickle. Thomas G. Butson of the New York Time's instant-biography of Mikhail S. Gorbachev will come not second too soon.

ButGorbachev, for all its misdirected stabs at historical perspective, is a rather embarrassing attempt to fashion significance and the ever-crucial Historical Trend out of a series of newspaper headline and some superficial research.

of course, the Soviets don't splash their head Reds all overComrademagazine, especially when the ostensible leader is desperately trying to create himself a cult of personality. Gorbachev, though more visible than most saw the public stare in the West only in recent trips to Canada and Britain; he is but tangentially connected to the events of the last three decades

Unlike the words of Chernenko and Yuri v. Andropov neither the new leader's autobiography nor his collected speeches appear to have been published in their English or Russian and Gorbachev is too young have mattered back before World War II, when reality was not completely filtered though the ideological scrubbers

So Butson had a formidable task in researching his opus, but that does not come close to justifying what can charitably by called an exercise in glorified. bllshitting.

Botson, the Times' assistant foreign editor, tries everything to pad his Who's Who biography into a $1495 hardcover offering. He searches for significance in offering. HE searches for significance in Gorbachev's halcyon State Law School, calling him ambitious, active, but not terribly well known. But the best evidence he can muster is the following from two unnamed classmates.

They said that despite his Kmosomol activity he was not generally known throughout the law school, let alone the university

and

The same opinion was offered by another woman who studies in the same building, although not at the Law School. She said that she probably met him in the five years she was there, but she could not remember him at all.

Take note, thesis writers, this is research.

BUTSON IS ALSO left source less and clueless when it comes to accounting for Gorbachev's actions during the reform days of Andropos's brief rule, when Gorbachev's presumably was in sync with the prevailing root--out bourgeois-corruption atmosphere. The high point of this brief period was Andropov's purge of corrupt Brezhnelackeys, who were to upright bureaucracy what Massachusetts State House politics are to democratic government.

What do Andropov's purges say about Gorbachev.

Gorbachev's as a member of the Politburo, would almost certainly have had a general say in the firings and he may have been directly involved in some of them since they involved officials in areas such as consumer oriented industry, where he was increasingly becoming involved.

Butson's pseudo Kremlinology is a shame, because it is possible to analyze Gorbachev's significance even before the Russian Research Center crowd goes into its historiographical full court press