IN line with certain glaring trends of' global socio-ethical degeneration which basically, apart from many other concomitant factors, have facilitated the emergence and also the impact of what might be termed the Gorbachev phenomenon in the erstwhile USSR, in August 1991, when a somewhat phoney attempt at a coup d'e'tat was overcome with suspicious case, Gorbachev, yielding reluctantly to a more blatant, if also slippery accomplice, Yeltsin, said: "My mission is fulfilled".