Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/moyfiles/1987moy.001

Text File | 1993-07-21 | 45KB | 809 lines

                                                                                January 4, 1988

Man of the Year

The Education of Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev



An intimate biography of the private man


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 at 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
queueing 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.

--By George J. Church. Reported by David Aikman/Washington,
James O. Jackson/Moscow and John Kohan/Stavropol