1987
Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev
BY GEORGE J. CHURCH
Officials of the Zavorovo state farm near Moscow had prepared carefully
for the big day last August. They had even built a special staircase to spare
their distinguished visitor the indignity of climbing down a hill to the potato
fields below the main road. Mikhail Gorbachev would have none of it. Stepping
out of his ZIL limousine, he gave the staircase a dismissive wave and scrambled
down the steep incline in his neatly pressed gray business suit, leaving his
surprised entourage to run after him in full view of television cameras.
At the bottom of the hill, Gorbachev asked the farmers, lined up beside
their equipment like soldiers on parade, about the mood on the farm. "Good.
Businesslike," came the replies. Gorbachev was not satisfied. "I always hear
the same answer," he said. "[But] there are always problems." For example, he
asked, was everything available "except for vodka," a teasing reference to his
antialcoholism campaign. Well, no, one farmer mumbled. It was the season for
making jams and jellies, and sugar was scarce. Gorbachev shot back: Do you know
why? Moonshiners are buying up all the sugar to make home brew. "Let's talk
straight with one another," said the leader. "Isn't it time to bring the making
of moonshine to an end? That sort of people belong back in the times when the
dinosaurs lived."
That exchange was typical of the Gorbachev style, a remarkably Western mix
of charm and sermonizing. The effect was apparent during the December summit
with Ronald Reagan. Alternately jovial and argumentative, combining sharp
intelligence with a homey touch and playing to the camera in the most effective
way—by seeming to ignore it—he came across as a Kremlin version of the Great
Communicator. Add an attractive, strong-willed wife, and the picture of an
American-style politician is complete.
Also misleading. In most of his views, Gorbachev is a thoroughly Soviet,
obdurately Communist figure. When he speaks of "democracy," as he incessantly
does, he does not mean anything Thomas Jefferson would have recognized; he
promotes freer discussion within the Communist Party only as a substitute for
the political opposition he makes clear he will not tolerate. If he voices
criticism of Soviet society, it is because that system has in his view strayed
from the ideals of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, the founder of the Soviet state and
Gorbachev's idol. And although he argues frequently for a new relationship with
the U.S., he seems to have an odd conception of America as a Dickensian hell
ruled by the military-industrial complex.
The contradictions in his personality are enough to raise a question: Who
exactly is Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev? It is not an easy question to answer:
unhappily, glasnost does not yet extend to the life of its author. One reason,
no doubt, is his wariness about encouraging a "cult of personality"—the
euphemism for glorification of an all-powerful leader, which reached sickening
heights under Joseph Stalin in Gorbachev's student days and is thus associated
in Soviet minds with Stalin's terror. Gorbachev has reacted to incipient
hagiography in the Soviet press by being tight-lipped about his private life.
Subordinates take their cue from the boss. A high official mentioned to a group
of foreigners recently that he had known the General Secretary as a university
student. "What was Gorbachev like in those days?" the man asked. He paused
reflectively, smiled and said, "I don't remember."
Gorbachev's official biography is little more than a bare-bones list of
Communist Party offices held, and it lacks some of the most elementary
information. For example, it is not known for certain whether he has any
siblings. Some Soviets say he has a brother who works in agriculture, but no
one seems to know the man's name or age. Reports of a sister cannot be
confirmed.
From a variety of sources, however, TIME has pieced together a detailed,
though still incomplete, picture of Gorbachev's early days and his rise to
command. The story begins in Privolnoye, a farming village (pop. 3,000) in the
south of the Russian republic, 124 miles from the city of Stavropol. A
one-story brick cottage with a small kitchen, three rooms and a pleasant garden
plot still stands there: Gorbachev was born in that house on March 2, 1931.
It was a time of bloodshed and terror. Stalin's drive to force Soviet
peasants into collective farms was at its height. Those who resisted were
deported or shot. Peasants destroyed animals rather than let them be
confiscated by the collectives. That slaughter, along with the Soviet
government's oppressive requisitions of grain from the newly formed collective
farms, created a man-made famine that was raging when Gorbachev was born.
Millions eventually died.
The Gorbachev family probably avoided the worst of the suffering: it was
on the winning side. Mikhail's grandfather Andrei helped organize the Khleborob
(bread producer) collective farm in the year of Gorbachev's birth. Andrei's son
Sergei drove a combine for a nearby government machine-tractor station. But
Mikhail could hardly have helped hearing tales of the disruption that continued
during his infancy. As General Secretary, Gorbachev has defended the
collectivization and even the repression of the kulaks (well-off peasants), who
were deported or executed as class enemies. But perhaps because of boyhood
memories, he has criticized the brutality shown to a less prosperous group, the
so-called middle peasants. A classmate remembers that as a college student
after Stalin's death, Gorbachev spoke of a middle-peasant relative who had been
arrested and, the classmate assumes, shot.
Not long after the turmoil over collectivization died down in the
mid-1930s, the Soviet Union was hit by the second trauma of Gorbachev's
boyhood: the Nazi invasion. Mikhail was eleven years old when German tanks
rumbled into nearby Stavropol at the start of what became the Stalingrad
campaign. Hitler's troops stayed in the area for almost six months before being
driven out by the Red Army. In all probability, though, the Nazis would not
have bothered to occupy a village as small as Privolnoye, so Gorbachev seems to
have escaped the worst rigors of the war. Only in 1950, when he traveled north
to university in Moscow, did he apparently become fully aware of the
destruction visited on his homeland. He has said that on that 800-mile train
ride, he saw "the ruined Stalingrad, Rostov, Kharkov and Voronezh. And how many
such ruined cities there were...Everything lay in ruins: hundreds and thousands
of cities, towns and villages, factories and mills."
Even earlier, though, the war touched young Mikhail. In Privolnoye, as in
thousands of other villages and towns in the U.S.S.R., there is an eternal
flame and a monument to those who lost their lives in what Soviets call the
Great Patriotic War. The name Gorbachev appears on the memorial seven times,
though it is not certain which of his relatives are meant. His father Sergei
was conscripted and fought a the front for four years, during which "Misha"
(the common Russian nickname for Mikhail) must have spent much time alone with
his mother Maria Panteleyevna Gorbachev. In a recent interview on Soviet TV,
she recalled that at one period during the war Gorbachev could not go to school
for several months because he had no shoes. Sergei wrote home urging Maria
Panteleyevna to sell anything she could and buy shoes because "Misha must go to
school." Maria Panteleyevna, now well into her 70s and a widow (Sergei died in
1976), continues to live in Privolnoye.
Growing up in a farming village, Gorbachev was introduced early to hard
work. As a young boy, he probably accompanied his combine-driver father into
the fields. At 14 he was driving a combine himself after school and during the
summers. It was a hot and sweaty job in that part of the Soviet Union, where
summer temperatures reach well into the 90s, and the combines had no cabins.
After a few minutes the driver would be surrounded by a cloud of grain chaff
and dust that made breathing difficult. In winter it was so cold that Gorbachev
had to wrap himself in straw to keep from freezing. He stood it well enough to
be awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labor in 1949, a rare honor for an
18-year-old. The award, his impeccable political credentials—peasant
background, gather and grandfather Communist Party members—and the silver
medal he received upon graduation from high school as second in his class all
helped him win a place at Moscow State University in the fall of 1950.
Gorbachev was already showing wide-ranging intellectual curiosity. "I
cannot even say for which subjects I felt a special interest in school," he
told an Italian interviewer much later. "At the outset I wanted to enter the
physics faculty [of Moscow State University]. I liked mathematics a lot, but I
also liked history and literature. To this day I can recite by heart poetry
that I learned at school." He lacked the entrance requirements to pursue
science courses, so he decided to study law.
The choice was unconventional. Law in those Stalinist days had no
prestige; it was even despised by many Soviets. The task of a lawyer was to
find rationalizations for the state to crush its opponents. Nonetheless,
Gorbachev's classes did expose him to a wider range of ideas than he would have
encountered pursuing a science curriculum. Like all other Soviet students,
Gorbachev was drilled in Marxism-Leninism, and learned minute details about the
life of Stalin. But as a law student he took classes in the history of
political ideas and studied the works of Thomas Aquinas, Hobbes, Locke and
Machiavelli. Gorbachev also studied Latin. Several classes were taught by
professors who had somehow managed to survive from prerevolutionary days.
When he began his studies, the adulation of Stalin, "the greatest genius
of all times and peoples," was at its height, and the earnest young provincial
was not immune to it. "He, like everyone else at the time, was a Stalinist,"
says Zdenek Mlynar, a Czech who studied law at Moscow State University and
later became a top party official in his homeland. But Gorbachev displayed a
streak of hardheaded realism about Soviet life. He and Mlynar once watched a
propaganda movie, Cossacks of the Kuban, picturing happy peasants at tables
groaning with food. "It's not like that at all," grumbled Gorbachev, who
remembered hunger in his home region. Mlynar adds that "when we were studying
collective-farm law, Gorbachev explained to me how insignificant
collective-farm legislation was in day-to-day life and how important, on the
other had, was brute force, which alone secured working discipline on the
collective farms."
Fridrikh Neznansky, another fellow law student and now a Soviet emigre,
recalls that Gorbachev even then displayed a veneration for Lenin going well
beyond what was demanded of Soviet students. He was especially impressed,
Neznansky says, by Lenin's doctrine of "one step forward, two steps back"—in
other words, the ability to maneuver and to retreat if necessary while pursuing
a goal. Tactical flexibility has been a hallmark of Gorbachev's career ever
since. "In politics and ideology, we are seeking to revive the spirit of
Leninism," Gorbachev writes in his recently published book, Perestroika. "Many
decades of being mesmerized by dogma, by a rule-book approach, have had their
effect. Today we want to introduce a genuinely creative spirit into our
theoretical work." The first faint glimmerings of glasnost might also be
discerned in Gorbachev's law-school attitudes. Mlynar remembers that students
were taught to regard anyone who dissented from the Stalinist line as a
criminal. Gorbachev, however, remarked to his Czech classmate: "But Lenin did
not order the arrest of Martov [leader of the Mensheviks, a socialist splinter
group]. He allowed him to leave the country."
Outside class, students led a grim existence. Gorbachev spent the first
three of his student years in the shabby Stromynka student hostel, an 18th
century former barracks that housed 10,000 young people packed eight or more to
a room. There was a kitchen and a washroom on each floor, but no proper bathing
facilities. Gorbachev and his roommates would head to a public bathhouse twice
a month. They stored their personal belongings in suitcases under the beds.
Many of the youths could not even afford tea. Instead, they drank "student
tea," a concoction of hot water and sugar. The favorite diversion was foreign
movies, most of them captured by the Red Army from German forces and shown in
the "culture club" on the main floor. Johnny Weissmuller's Tarzan movies were
most popular. After one such epic show, the Stromynka hostel would resound with
jungle whoops by the students.
In this maelstrom, Gorbachev somehow found time and privacy for romance.
Male and female students lived on the same floors, though they had separate
sleeping and bathroom facilities. Gorbachev and his roommates drew up a
complicated schedule guaranteeing each of them one hour alone in the room every
week to entertain a female guest. On the hall bulletin board, the periods of
privacy were discreetly designated "cleaning hours."
One of the women down the hall from Gorbachev was Raisa Maximovna
Titorenko, a bright, popular philosophy student a year younger than he. Mlynar
recalls that Mikhail initially had a good deal of competition for her
attention, but the two eventually began seeing each other regularly. The were
married early in 1954. The couple celebrated the occasion modestly with 30 or
so other students at a party in the corner of the dormitory eating hall, then
went to Gorbachev's room for their weeding night. Gorbachev's roommates had
arranged to stay away. The following day, however, they drifted back, and Raisa
returned to her room. The couple did not live together until several months
later, when they obtained married-student accommodations in the newly completed
34-story main building of Moscow State University.
Though Gorbachev was trained as a lawyer, he has never practices; his main
interest from his earliest days at Moscow State University was politics. Even
before leaving Privolnoye, he had joined the Komsomol, the youth league that
people ages 14 to 28 pass through in preparation for joining the Communist
Party. Armed with a glowing recommendation from the Stavropol committee, he
became a Komsomol organizer at the Moscow State University law school in 1952
and simultaneously, at 21, a member of the party proper. He was assigned to a
working-class area of Moscow for propaganda activity and the handling of
constituents' complaints, while continuing his Komsomol work at the university.
Those who knew Gorbachev as a young party activist agree that he was a
true believer among cynical careerists. He had some reservations about
particular policies, but when he spouted the Stalinist line of the moment, he
did so with evident conviction. Lev Yudovich, who graduated two years ahead of
Gorbachev, recalls having the young ideologue pointed out to him as someone to
fear. There was reason to be wary of him: Neznansky asserts that when Gorbachev
discovered that some fellow students had parents who were in political
disgrace, he called for their expulsion from the Komsomol and perhaps from the
university as well. Michel Tatu, a prominent French Kremlinologist and author
of a forthcoming biography of Gorbachev, is convinced that he joined in the
vicious anti-Semitic rhetoric of Stalin's last purge, launched just before the
dictator's death in early 1953. Mlynar does not deny that, but he insists that
Gorbachev steered clear of any individual persecutions.
By 1955, the year of Gorbachev's graduation, the Stalinist ice had broken
in the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev had taken over and was winding down the
terror. Ghostly figures began drifting back into Moscow from the labor camps.
But at the start of this period of ferment and change, Gorbachev removed
himself and Raisa from the relative sophistication of Moscow and returned to
the Stavropol area, where he was to stay for the next 23 years. According to
Neznansky, the young graduate tried for a position with the Moscow Komsomol
apparatus but lost out to a classmate and had little choice but to return to
the provinces if he wanted to continue a career in party politics. It may be
too that Gorbachev felt an obligation to the Stavropol Krai (territory)
authorities, who had apparently paid part of his university expenses, or that
he was simply homesick.
In any event, the Stavropol period remains the most obscure of Gorbachev's
life. It is known that he rose fast, from a minor job in the local Komsomol to
its first secretary after less than a year, then through a variety of Komsomol
and, later, party jobs. By 1962, when he was only 31, he was choosing party
members for promotion throughout Stavropol Krai. Finally in 1970, at the age of
39, he became first secretary of the territory, a job equivalent to governor of
an area roughly the size of South Carolina, with about 2.4 million people.
Along the way, he became a specialist in farming, the main activity of the
area. He took correspondence courses from Stavropol Agricultural Institute, and
in 1967 added a degree in agriculture to his Moscow law degree. Soviet emigres
and Stavropol residents provide some intriguing glimpses of Gorbachev on his
way up the party apparat.
Gorbachev showed an avid interest in the press. Vladimir Maximov, a writer
now living in Paris who worked for a Stavropol Komsomol newspaper in the 1950s,
recalls that the young official often visited the paper's offices for a chat.
"He would sit down with us in a casual manner," says Maximov. "We would uncork
a bottle of wine [for all his antialcoholism campaigning, Gorbachev still
enjoys an occasional drink] and usually talk politics. Khrushchev's report on
the crimes of the Stalinist era had recently appeared. The entire country was
still reeling from shock." Maximov and others of Gorbachev's generation,
however, remember the late 1950s as an exciting time. Khrushchev's secret
speech denouncing Stalin at the 20th Communist Party Congress in 1956 briefly
opened the way to a much freer atmosphere. It was false dawn. Repression
resumed a few years later. To this day, however, educated SOviets of
Gorbachev's generation, whose political attitudes were formed then and who are
now moving into positions of power, sometimes refer to themselves as "children
of the 20th Congress."
Gorbachev's interest in the press continued throughout the Stavropol
period. As party boss of the area, he often met with regional journalists for
talks similar to those he now holds in Moscow with the national press. Unlike
other party officials, he would stress that it was not enough for the
journalists to write articles that were ideologically correct; they also had to
be interesting. "Is anyone reading what you write?" he would ask.
Gorbachev remained open and accessible to his constituents. He usually set
out on foot for his job each morning. Stavropolitans quickly learned that they
could avoid having to make a formal appointment at Gorbachev's office on Lenin
Square by buttonholing him on his walk up Dzerzhinsky Street and discussing
their problems then. He also began in Stavropol Krai the walkabouts that were
later to cause a national sensation when he continued the practice as General
Secretary. On a visit to a village in the Izobilnynsky district, he heard from
an indignant mother of six children how the manager of a state store had
treated her rudely. The storekeeper was fired. Gorbachev showed some
independence from Moscow when he was Stavropol party boss. Turned down for
state financing of a permanent circus building, he solicited funds from local
organizations and institutions and got the building put up anyway.
The Gorbachevs relieved the monotony of provincial life with several trips
to Western Europe, Mikhail traveling as a member of party delegations visiting
foreign Communists and Raisa once or twice accompanying him. On the first trip,
in 1966, Gorbachev later recalled, the couple rented a Renault and spent
several weeks driving 3,400 miles through the length and breadth of France,
with a side trip to Italy.
Was Gorbachev getting restless with provincial posts? Perhaps. Mlynar, who
was rising toward the top level of the Czech Communist Party, visited his old
classmate in 1967 and recalls that Gorbachev complained about excessive
interference by Moscow in local affairs. Mlynar described the sweeping reforms
that Alexander Dubcek was then beginning in Czechoslovakia. He remembers
Gorbachev saying, with a sign, "Perhaps there are possibilities in
Czechoslovakia because conditions are different." The Czech reforms, however,
were crushed by Soviet tanks the following year, and Mlynar went into exile; he
now lives in Austria. The two old friends talked and drank through that
afternoon and deep into the night. When they finally returned to Gorbachev's
apartment, much the worse for wear, Raisa was furious.
Just how Gorbachev rose out of provincial obscurity is still somewhat
mysterious. As late as 1978, few outside Stavropol Krai had ever heard of him.
The best answer seems to be that he attracted a number of powerful patrons. The
first was Fyodor Kulakov, who as party boss in Stavropol first spotted
Gorbachev as having great promise. After Kulakov became Agriculture Secretary
for the entire Soviet Union, Gorbachev eventually succeeded him in
Stavropol—and Kulakov apparently made sure his protege became known in Moscow.
In 1977 the "Ipatovsky method," a new technique of harvesting grain quickly by
using flying squads of combines, was judged a smashing success. The idea was
probably Kulakov's, but it was first tried in the district of Ipatovsky, in
Stavropol Krai, under Gorbachev's supervision. The young regional politician
was accorded the honor of an interview on the front page of Pravda, his first
taste of national publicity.
Geography gave Gorbachev a mighty assist too. Christian Schmidt-Hauer, a
West German journalist and biographer, observes that if Gorbachev had been
party chief in, say, Murmansk in the far north, he would never have become
General Secretary. But in Stavropol Krai, he was on hand to welcome top Moscow
officials who came to the local spas at Mineralnye Vody and Kislovodsk for
vacations and medical treatment. They found their host unusual in several
respects. Says Soviet Historian Roy Medvedev: "A regional party first secretary
who was intelligent and congenial would have been considered untypical. If
Gorbachev had yelled, sworn, been a heavy drinker or a high liver with a rest
house outside of town where officials could be entertained by pretty
waitresses, that would have been considered normal behavior."
Gorbachev was not like that at all. He was a quiet and pleasant host with
a reputation throughout the district for incorruptibility. Writer Maximov
relates a story about a mutual friend, a poet, who asked Gorbachev as a young
Komsomol official to help him buy a Volga sedan. Gorbachev obligingly used his
influence to speed delivery. The poet promptly sold the car on the black market
and returned to ask Gorbachev for help in buying another. Says Maximov:
"Gorbachev did not usually lose his temper, but on that occasion he started
shouting and threw the poet out of his office, ordering him never to show his
face there again."
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
imply 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.
Gorbachev was already preparing himself for national leadership. While
still in charge of farming, he gathered Soviet academic experts for a series f
seminars held sometimes in the Central Committee offices, sometimes in a dacha
outside Moscow. The sessions started with problems of agriculture but quickly
developed into freewheeling discussions of what was wrong with the economy in
general and how it might be fixed. Among the participants were Economists Abel
Aganbegyan, who had been urging decentralization and a wider role for market
incentives since the mid-1960s, and Tatyana Zaslavskaya, a leading sociologist.
Zaslavskaya recalls one encounter with Gorbachev: "I sat next to him. It is
incredible what power and drive emanate from him. One feels as if it were a
strong field of energy. His vitality is extraordinary, and yet, although you
feel this tension, he is a good listener and waits for you to finish."
The rising Kremlin star got a firsthand look at how far the Soviet economy
had fallen behind the West's. When Gorbachev joined the national hierarchy, he
was already well traveled by comparison with such other Soviet leaders as
Andropov, who never set foot outside the Communist world, and Suslov, who
reportedly once told a visa applicant that he saw no reason why anyone would
want to journey beyond he U.S.S.R.
As a Politburo member Gorbachev in 1983 headed a Soviet agricultural
delegation on a visit to Canada and spent ten days poking around farms,
processing plants and supermarkets. At one cattle ranch, he asked to see "some
of the workers." The rancher replied that there were none; he ran the spread of
several hundred acres with only his family and handful of day laborers. A
Canadian host who speaks Russian heard Gorbachev mutter under his breath, "We
are not going to see this [in the Soviet Union] for another 50 years." Eugene
Whelan, then Minister of Agriculture and Gorbachev's official host, was
surprised on another occasion to hear the Soviet leader comment about the
invasion of Afghanistan: "It was a mistake." (He was later to call Afghanistan
a "bleeding wound," but in public he still justifies the invasion.) In the same
year, however, Gorbachev served on a Politburo crisis-management subgroup that
sought to justify the Soviet downing of a Korean Air Lines passenger jet by
asserting that the plane had been on a spying mission for the U.S.
By the time a fatal kidney ailment cut short Andropov's tenure in early
1984, Gorbachev was already a candidate to succeed his former mentor. At
Andropov's funeral, Gorbachev made a telling gesture of his closeness to the
late General Secretary: he was the only Politburo member publicly to console
Andropov's bereaved widow Tatyana. But the Old Guard made a final stand,
choosing Chernenko instead. Gorbachev went along, and even agreed to make the
nominating speech. He probably knew his turn would come soon enough. Ailing and
72, Chernenko was not going to last long. In fact, through much of his year in
power Chernenko was so ill that Gorbachev, his principal deputy, in effect ran
the country.
Even so, he had opposition. Grigori Romanov, the hard-line former
Leningrad party boss who was once thought be Gorbachev's chief rival, had
apparently given up on winning the top job for himself. But at the Politburo
session called immediately after Chernenko's death, Romanov reportedly tried a
stop-Gorbachev maneuver, nominating Moscow Party Boss Viktor Grishin for
General Secretary. By some accounts, however, KGB Chief Viktor Chebrikov hinted
that his agency had compiled dossiers on the corruption in the Moscow party
apparatus that could be highly embarrassing to Grishin. (Chebrikov was then a
candidate member of the Politburo; he has since moved up to full membership.)
Andrei Gromyko, then Foreign Minister, carried the day with a nominating speech
for Gorbachev during which he coined the now celebrated remark, "This man has a
nice smile, but he has iron teeth." Gromyko's speech was surprising in two
respects: it appears to have been improvised, and it contained none of the
lengthy recitation of the hero's accomplishments traditional on such occasions.
Gromyko appeared to be saying: this man has not really done all that much yet,
but he is still the best we have.
Gorbachev had been in power only a month when he roamed around the
industrial Proletarsky district of Moscow, visiting supermarkets, chatting with
workers at the Likhachyov truck factory, discussing computer training with
teachers at School No. 514 and nurses' pay with the staff of City Hospital No.
53. He even dropped into a young couple's apartment for tea. That was the first
of the walkabouts that have taken him, sometimes accompanied by Raisa, from
Murmansk in the north to Kamchatka on the shores of the Pacific. On several of
his tours he has displayed an easy informality and an almost impish distaste
for ceremonial oratory. Entering the hall of the Starnikovsky Farm near Moscow
to talk to livestock breeders last summer, he veered away from the row of seats
on the tribunal and perched on the edge of the table so that he could be closer
to the crowd. In October, at the Baltic Shipyards in Leningrad, a spokesman for
the workers began a monotone welcoming speech expressing a wish that
perestroika would develop even faster. Gorbachev interrupted with playful cries
of "Davai! Davai!" (Let's go to it!), drawing a big laugh from the crowd.
Gorbachev has an apartment in central Moscow, but lives most of the time
in a closed and guarded area of single-family mansions on the western outskirts
of the city. From there he is driven downtown daily at 9 a.m. in a four-ZIL
motorcade: one car for himself; two for aides and bodyguards, and a heavily
curtained vehicle bristling with antennas that is assumed to carry the coding
equipment for launching nuclear weapons. His main office is on the fifth floor
of the Central committee headquarters, a quarter of a mile from the Kremlin; he
also maintains an office in a building just behind the Lenin Mausoleum and the
Kremlin wall, but he uses it mostly to receive visitors. He usually returns
home at about 6 p.m. in another motorcade. Extra traffic police are stationed
along Kutuzovsky Prospekt to clear the central lanes for the four limousines.
He stays downtown late only when there is some special ceremonial function or
when, as often happens, the regular Thursday Politburo meeting runs into the
evening.
While Gorbachev's working schedule does not seem to be overly taxing, he
recently answered an Italian interviewer's question as to how he spends his
free time by saying simply, "I have none." He is, however, an avid theatergoer.
In Stavropol he and Raisa attended not only every play that opened but also
many dress rehearsals. In Moscow, while preparing for the Washington summit,
they found time to take in The Peace of Brest, a historical drama about Lenin's
early years in power that opened Nov. 30.
The Gorbachevs have a daughter Irina, 28, who is a physician and married
to another doctor, and two known grandchildren. The extent to which the
Gorbachevs guard their family privacy can be gauged by some of the things that
are not know for sure: Irina's married name (only the first name of her
husband, Anatoli, has been disclosed); the granddaughter's name (it has been
reported as both Oksana and Xenia); her age (probably seven); and the sex and
name of a second grandchild (Gorbachev proudly told former U.S. President Jimmy
Carter, who visited Moscow last summer, that one had just been born, but would
disclose no more than that).
Gorbachev retains his ties to Privolnoye, going to see his mother there at
least once a year. On one trip to Stavropol in 1982, Gorbachev, by then a
member of the Politburo, talked with aged collective farmers, who complained
about their low pensions of 36 rubles ($49.30) a month. "I know my mother also
receives 36 rubles, but she keeps chickens and a cow; why don't you?" Gorbachev
replied. (Nonetheless, back in Moscow, he saw to it that pensions were
increased.) Maria Panteleyevna regularly attends Russian Orthodox Church
services, and there are reports that she had Gorbachev baptized. Gorbachev has
said that his grandparents kept icons in their home, hiding them behind
pictures of Lenin and Stalin, and once took him to church. He added, though,
that he had no desire to go back. Officially, at least, he is an atheist whose
occasional references to God are probably no more than an unconscious
repetition of phrases common in the rural Russia of his boyhood.
As a law student, Gorbachev received some practical training in oratory.
That, plus a natural flair for speaking, has produced a man who is considered
the finest orator of any Soviet leader since Lenin (who was also trained as a
lawyer). Gorbachev's phraseology is not remarkable, or at least does not read
well in translation. The English version of Perestroika, published in the U.S.
just before the December summit, is blandly general. But in a Gorbachev speech,
as TV viewers around the world have discovered, phrases that seem flat on the
printed page suddenly come to life.
Russian is a language spoken with the hands, the eyebrows, and occasional
shake of the head from side to side or a shrug of the shoulders. Gorbachev has
mastered those gestures, and more. He may slice the air with a modified karate
chop or spin his hands one over the other like a pinwheel, then extend them
palms up in a gesture of vulnerability, only to clench them into fists a moment
later. All the time his intense eyes lock onto a listener's. The eyes, he once
told an audience in Prague, never lie. Much of his animation comes through even
in translation. In a TV interview, for example, he may pause reflectively after
a question, start an answer with a few slow phrases, then burst into a torrent
of words that an interpreter can barely keep up with.
Such skills have served Gorbachev well in his 33 months in office. Though
he grumbles about opposition to his policies from a bureaucracy that "does not
want change and does not want to lose some rights associated with privileges,"
he has consolidated his power rapidly. He had thoroughly purged the ranks of
the Politburo, the Central Committee and government ministries of leaders
judged to be incompetent or dragging their feet on reform. More than half of
all government ministers and 44% of party Central Committee members have been
replaced since he took over.
Gorbachev's idea of glasnost stops well short of Western-style artistic
and journalistic freedom. Nonetheless, the policy has gone further than anyone
would have predicted even a few years ago, winning Gorbachev the enthusiastic
approval of intellectuals. Says Vitali Korotich, editor of Ogonyok, an
illustrated weekly that has published hard-hitting articles about social
problems as well as anthologies of long-suppressed poetry: "This is an evening
of dancing in a society that has never danced."
Perestroika, however, is still more platitude than policy. Gorbachev
confessed in June that "despite tremendous efforts, the restructuring drive has
in actual fact not reached many localities." In particular, agricultural
reforms designed to give farmers more incentive, which Gorbachev began
experimenting with back in Stavropol and for which he supposedly won Politburo
approval as long ago as 1983, have yet to be put into effect nationwide.
Meanwhile, the economy continues to fall behind those of the West. As recently
as 1975, the Soviet economy was about 58% as large as its U.S. counterpart. But
by 1984 that figure had fallen to 54%, and the gap is probably still growing.
WIth his usual hard-boiled realism, Gorbachev told the Central Committee
shortly before becoming General Secretary, "We cannot remain a major power in
world affairs unless we put our domestic house in order."
At best, it will take years before Gorbachev's program of freeing industry
from Moscow's stifling central control results in any significant increase in
the quantity and quality of gods reaching Soviet consumers. Gorbachev complains
that "Soviet rockets can find Halley's comet and fly to Venus with amazing
accuracy, but...many household appliances are of poor quality." The Soviet
leader may be hard put to maintain the popular support he is counting on to
overcome bureaucratic lethargy and opposition. Gauging public opinion in the
U.S.S.R. is a highly uncertain art, but letters to the Soviet press often
approve the idea of perestroika while simultaneously complaining that the
writers have not seen much of it yet. Some polls disclose considerable
grumbling that perestroika has so far meant only harder work for little
measurable reward. Consumers may soon have to pay more for some of the
necessities of life if Gorbachev follows through on his plan to trim or
eliminate many state subsidies. The Kremlin boss rightly complains that the
subsidies on bread, for example, make is so cheap that children sometimes use
loaves as footballs. But a higher price for bread, while it might be fully
justified by production costs, is likely to cause strong discontent.
Gorbachev acknowledges that his antialcohol campaign is highly unpopular.
He once told a group of writers that he was aware of "threats" as well as
grumbling from the long lines of people queuing up to buy scarce and expensive
vodka. One gag has a man at the end of one of the liquor-store lines announcing
that he is so furious he is going over to the Kremlin to shoot Gorbachev. He
returns in a few minutes, however, and resumes his place in the queue. "Well,
did you do it?" asks a comrade. "You must be joking," the would-be assassin
replies. "The line over there is even longer."
In foreign policy too, Gorbachev's approach is a mixture of much touted
"new thinking" and dismayingly old reflexes. Despite his flexibility in the
realm of superpower relations, he maintains some strange attitudes about the
U.S. By his own account, he began reading American history as a law student,
and he has kept himself remarkably well informed. In recent interviews he has
referred offhandedly to matters, such as Ronald Reagan's "economic bill of
rights," that are not widely known even to U.S. citizens.
Nonetheless, he seems to have a streak of what can only be described as
anti-Americanism. Perhaps the first American to have an extended conversation
with him was John Chrystal, chairman of Bankers Trust of Des Moines and a
frequent traveler to the Soviet Union, who called on Gorbachev in 1981. Says
Chrystal: "He does not believe, never having been here, that the U.S. has
abject poverty and quite a lot of it. My impression is that he thinks there are
whole towns that are just sort of destitute." Eugene Whelan, the former
Canadian Agriculture Minister who was later Gorbachev's host in North America,
also visited him in 1981 and got into an argument about armaments. Says Whelan:
"He was going on about how the U.S. was the aggressor, how it was making
weapons. He said the U.S. was returning to the conditions of the 1950s." When
Whelan remonstrated that in the American view it was the Soviet Union that had
piled up weapons far beyond any legitimate defense needs, Gorbachev brusquely
responded, "That is erroneous."
At Chernenko's funeral in 1985, Gorbachev encountered Armand Hammer, the
American businessman who has been trading with the Soviets since Lenin's day,
and denounced Ronald Reagan to him as a man who wanted war. He mellowed after
meeting the U.S. President later that year at their first summit in Geneva, and
today speaks respectfully of Reagan. Still, when Hammer called at the Kremlin
in 1986, Gorbachev told him, "Your President couldn't make peace if he wanted
to. He's a prisoner of the military-industrial complex," which in Gorbachev's
mind seems to be both all powerful and moved by an implacable hostility to the
Soviets. Hammer tried to dissuade him but got nowhere, largely, he suspects,
because Gorbachev had been put in a defensive mood by U.S. and other foreign
criticism of his handling of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear-plant accident. Says
Hammer: "Gorbachev's weakness is that he has a temper, and that he flares up,
and that he had a lot of pride, of course, and self-confidence." The Soviet
leader has generally managed to keep his temper under control in public.
Indeed, friends and opponents agree that he is almost invariably polite. But he
does blow up now and then—especially, as foreign TV viewers have discovered,
when he is questioned sharply about the Soviet Union's human-rights record.
Gorbachev, however, need not admire Americans in order to live peaceably
with them. Nor is it necessary for the U.S. to enroll in a Gorbachev
personality cult in order to recognize the Soviet leader as being a figure of
hope, for all his contradictions. His upbringing, schooling and rise to power
have produced a man of immense incongruities, stubborn and flexible, a faithful
ideologue and a radical experimenter.
He could be the most dangerous adversary the U.S. and its allies have
faced in decades—or the most constructive. Molded by famine and war, promised
a measure of hope after Stalin's demise and then abruptly disillusioned,
Gorbachev is not the sort of man who would willingly drag his country back into
the dark days of repression, economic hardship and international obloquy. If
there is a lesson in the 56-year education of Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, it
is that a new unfamiliar kind of leader has risen in the Soviet Union, and that
the old rules of dealing with that long-suffering land are suddenly outdated.
For the West, the education is just beginning.
—Reported by David Aikman/Washington, James O. Jackson/Moscow and John Kohan/Stavropol
COVERS GALLERY: Click here to see the cover image from 1987
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