The Education of Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev

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The young party chief's reputation pleased two important spa guests: Mikhail Suslov, then the chief Soviet ideologist, and KGB Chief Yuri Andropov, both austere figures disgusted by the corruption of the Brezhnev era. When Kulakov died in 1978, he left vacant the position of Communist Party Central Committee Secretary in charge of agriculture. To fill it, General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev, presumably acting on the advice of Suslov and Andropov, chose a man he had evidently met only recently: Gorbachev. That meeting occurred on Sept. 19, 1978, at the tiny railroad station in Mineralnye Vody, where Brezhnev's train stopped for a brief time. In one of the more remarkable moments in Soviet history, four men who were all to serve as General Secretary found themselves on the same narrow station platform: Brezhnev; Andropov, who had come over from the nearby spa and in 1982 would succeed Brezhnev; Konstantin Chernenko, then Brezhnev's chief aide and in 1984 Andropov's successor; and Gorbachev, who would take over from Chernenko as General Secretary the following year. Less than a month after that gathering, Gorbachev was plucked out of Stavropol to become, at 47, a member of the national hierarchy, ranking 20th among all Soviet leaders.

How he leaped from there to No. 1 in only seven more years is another question still not fully answered. Certainly his rise was not attributable to % any glittering success in agriculture. Quite the opposite: the grain harvest fell from a record 230 million tons in 1978, when Gorbachev was taking over the agriculture portfolio, to a calamitous total of perhaps only 155 million tons in 1981. Bad weather played a role. So did Brezhnev, who announced a grandiose reorganization of agriculture that seemed to create more problems than it solved. Still, it is remarkable that Gorbachev managed not only to escape blame but to advance his career amid the farming fiasco. Only a year after returning to Moscow, he became a candidate member of the Politburo. The following year, at 49, he was made a full member. Gorbachev was eight years younger than the next youngest Politburo member and 21 years younger than the average age of his colleagues.

One reason Gorbachev's agriculture record was not held against him was simply that the Kremlin leadership found itself in desperate need of new blood. Brezhnev's health was faltering, and his 18-year regime was sinking into a twilight of stagnation and corruption. When Brezhnev died in 1982 and Andropov came into office with plans for reform, he immediately began grooming Gorbachev to become a key lieutenant in his clean-up campaign.