Authors: David Hoffman
Officially, Gorbachev came to London as head of a Supreme Soviet delegation, but his reception and performance were anything but low-key. He charmed his hosts and captured the imagination of Britain. Television had never looked kindly on any Soviet leader, but Gorbachev thrived on the attention. “Red Star is born,” the
Daily Mail
said of Raisa. The Gorbachevs stopped in the cavernous reading room of the British Museum to see the place where Karl Marx had written
Das Kapital
, and they toured Westminster Abbey, seeing the graves of medieval kings, memorials to national poets, taking interest in the stained glass windows and the architecture.
On Monday, Thatcher gave an interview to the BBC. In her first answer to a question, she declared:
“I like Mr. Gorbachev. We can do business together.”
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Gorbachev’s visit was interrupted by news of the sudden death in Moscow of Dmitri Ustinov, the defense minister. Gorbachev flew home. Without Ustinov, there would be a new leadership vacuum. Chernenko was so ill he could not attend Ustinov’s funeral, and Gorbachev faced still more uncertainty in the Kremlin. “The leadership of the country was in a deplorable state,” he said.
Thatcher visited Reagan at Camp David on December 22, 1984. In preparation for the visit, the president had in his pocket seven note cards of talking points. The second card said, “Understand Gorbachev was impressive.” And, “What are your impressions?”
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Thatcher delivered a detailed report on the lunch at Chequers: human rights, economics, arms
control. Thatcher said Gorbachev was more charming and more open to discussion and debate than his predecessors. She recounted how Gorbachev had zeroed in on the Strategic Defense Initiative. In response, Reagan opened up with a fulsome description of his great dream as both a technological quest and a moral imperative, with an ultimate goal of eliminating nuclear weapons. It was the first time Thatcher had heard Reagan talk about it directly, and she later confessed she was “horrified.” But she listened.
She also relayed to Reagan what Gorbachev had said to her: “Tell your friend President Reagan not to go ahead with space weapons.”
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To understand the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev, who, with Reagan, would change the world in the years ahead, we must first reach back a half century into the tumultuous events that confronted his people and his country, from Stalin’s terror and the unimaginable losses of World War II, through the hardships, thaws, triumphs and stagnation of the postwar years. All of these directly touched Gorbachev. In his early life, there are few clues he would later become a catalyst of immense change. He was a child of the Soviet system, hardly a radical. But one thread is visible through it all. Gorbachev, over a long period of time, saw a reality that was strikingly different from the artificial world portrayed by the party and the leadership. As he rose through the ranks, he accumulated insights and revelations about the huge chasm between how people actually lived and the stuffy slogans of those who ruled. Raisa, too, grasped the depth of this chasm, and reinforced Gorbachev’s determination to change it.
Gorbachev’s doubts were sown incrementally, over a generation, and for many years kept to himself. His first reaction to a disappointment or failure was always to strive to improve the system. He was never in a frame of mind to tear it down. By the time he became Soviet leader, he had fully absorbed the abysmal reality, but had limited understanding of how to fix it. His greatest skill was in political maneuvering to achieve his goals. He tried to rescue the system by unleashing forces of openness and political pluralism, hoping that these would heal the other maladies. They could not.
Gorbachev’s achievements in ending the Cold War—braking what he called the speeding locomotive of the nuclear arms race, allowing a revolution in Europe to unfold peacefully, ending the confrontation in the Third World—were not his first objectives. They grew out of his desire for radical change at home, rooted in his experience as a peasant son, a young witness to war, a university student during the thaw, a party official in the stagnation years and, most importantly, out of his own deep impressions about what had gone wrong.
Gorbachev did not set out to change the world, but rather to save his country. In the end, he did not save the country but may have saved the world.
Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev was born March 2, 1931, in the small village of Privolnoye, in the black earth region of Stavropol in southern Russia. His parents, Sergei and Maria, worked the land; life in his village was little changed over centuries. From childhood, Gorbachev remembered “adobe huts with an earthen floor, and no beds at all”—people slept near the oven for warmth.
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Gorbachev spent much of his childhood as the favorite of his mother’s parents; he often lived with them. They kept books of Marx, Engels and Lenin on a shelf, but also a Russian Orthodox religious icon. His maternal grandfather, Pantelei, was remembered by Gorbachev as a tolerant man, and immensely respected in the village. In those years, Gorbachev was the only son; a brother was born after the war, when he was seventeen years old. He seems to have had a happy childhood. “I enjoyed absolute freedom,” he recalled. “My grandparents made me feel like the most important member of the family.”
The country was soon plunged into suffering and tragedy. Famine struck the Stavropol region in 1933, when Gorbachev was just two years old. Stalin had launched the mass collectivization of agriculture, a brutal process of forcing the peasants into collective farms and punishing those known as
kulaks
, who were somewhat better off. A third to half of the population of Privolnoye died of hunger. “Entire families were dying, and the half-ruined ownerless huts would remain deserted for years,” Gorbachev remembered. Stalin’s purges took millions of lives among the peasantry in the 1930s.
Gorbachev’s family was touched by the purges, too. His grandfather on his father’s side, Andrei, rejected collectivization and tried to make it on his own. In the spring of 1934, Andrei was arrested and accused of failing to fulfill the sowing plan set by the government for individual peasants. “But no seeds were available to fulfill the plan,” Gorbachev recalled of the absurdity of the charge. Andrei was declared a “saboteur” and sent to a prison camp for two years, but released early, in 1935. On his return, he became a leader of the collective farm.
Two years later, grandfather Pantelei was also arrested. The charges were similarly absurd, that he had been a member of a counterrevolutionary organization and sabotaged the collective farm’s work. The arrest was “my first real trauma,” Gorbachev recalled. “They took him away in the middle of the night.” His grandfather was treated badly. Pantelei was finally released one winter evening in 1938, and returned to Privolnoye. Sitting at a hand-planed rustic table, he told the family how he had been beaten and tortured. Pantelei said he was convinced that Stalin did not know of the misdeeds of the secret police, and he did not blame the Soviet regime for his misfortunes. Pantelei never discussed it again. Gorbachev was only seven years old at the time, but later said the events left a deep, lasting impression on him. He held the secret of Pantelei’s ordeal privately, and only discussed it in the open a half century later.
By the late 1930s, both grandfathers were back at home, and village life seemed to be on an upswing. The families spent Sunday picnics in the woods. Then, on one of these Sundays, June 22, 1941, came terrifying news. A radio announced: the Germans had invaded the Soviet Union.
Gorbachev’s father was soon off to the front. He bought his ten-year-old son an ice cream, and a balalaika for a keepsake. Women, children and old men sobbed as the soldiers left. A massive snowfall that first winter put Privolnoye into deep isolation. There were no radios and newspapers seldom arrived. Gorbachev remembered that he “skipped from childhood directly into adulthood.” In the summer of 1942, the village fell under German occupation for four and a half months. The war devastated the countryside; they had no seed, no machines, no cattle. Famine spread in the winter and spring of 1944. The family was saved when Gorbachev’s mother, then thirty-three years old, sold his father’s last belongings, two pairs of boots and a suit, in a neighboring town for a 109-pound sack of corn.
In the summer of 1944, the family received a letter from the front. It contained family photographs and an announcement that Sergei Gorbachev had been killed in battle in the Carpathians. “The family cried for three days,” Gorbachev recalled. Then another letter came from his father saying he was alive. Both letters were dated August 27, 1944. Four days later, yet another letter—Sergei was indeed alive! How did it happen? His father later told Gorbachev that after an ambush, his unit had found his bag alone. He was missing and assumed dead. They sent the first letter to the family. Only days later did they discover him alive, but seriously wounded. Sergei told his son this confusion was typical of the chaos of war. “I have remembered this all my life,” Gorbachev later wrote.
In the early spring of 1943, Gorbachev was with other children, roaming the countryside, when they came to a remote stretch of forest between Privolnoye and a neighboring village. “There we stumbled upon the remains of Red Army soldiers, who had fought their last battle there in summer 1942. It was an unspeakable horror: decaying corpses, partly devoured by animals, skulls in rusted helmets, bleached bones, rifles protruding from the sleeves of rotting jackets. There was a light machine gun, some hand grenades, heaps of empty cartridges. There they lay, in the thick mud of the trenches and craters, unburied, staring at us out of black, gaping eye-sockets. We came home in a state of shock.”
Gorbachev was fourteen years old when the war ended. “Our generation is the generation of wartime children,” he said. “It has burned us, leaving its mark both on our characters and on our view of the world.”
After the war, Gorbachev worked in the fields each summer, “back-breaking labor twenty hours a day.” In high school, he was a good student and threw himself into the drama club and sports. School records showed Gorbachev had received top grades in Russian literature, trigonometry, history of the Soviet Union, the Soviet constitution, astronomy. He graduated in 1950 with a silver medal.
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For those long summers in the fields, he had also won an award, the Order of the Red Banner of Labor. This was a rare award for a schoolboy and most certainly helped Gorbachev win a place at Moscow State University, the most prestigious in the country, in the law department.
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Arriving in the capital in September 1950, at nineteen years old, the peasant boy was disoriented for the first few months in the bustling metropolis. Freshmen students lived twenty-two to a dorm room; for a few kopeks they could buy tea in the cafeteria, with unlimited free bread on the tables.
Gorbachev joined the Communist Party in 1952. To be a Communist then was to be a Stalinist. The first two years of his university life coincided with Stalin’s anti-cosmopolitan campaign, aimed at Jewish scholars and writers. This was an eye-opener for Gorbachev. He recalled that one morning, a friend, a Jew, had been confronted by a shouting, taunting mob and then crudely shoved off a tram. “I was shocked.”
By his own account, Gorbachev was taken with Soviet ideology, like many of his generation. “Communist ideology was very attractive for young people then,” he recalled. “The front-line soldiers came back from the war, most of them young people, filled with the pride of victory.” The younger generation hoped that war, famine and the Great Terror were things of the past, and believed they were building a new society of social justice and people power.
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Stalin was part of this fabric of belief. Stalin’s “Short Course” of the history of the party was held up to students as “a model of scientific thought,” Gorbachev recalled.
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The students “took many of the professed theses for granted, sincerely convinced of their truth.” Gorbachev was a leader of the Communist Youth League, known as the Komsomol. In high school he had written a final exam paper in which the title was borrowed from a song, “Stalin—our combat glory.”
But Gorbachev also was restive, and twice caused a stir by mildly speaking out against authority at the university. Once he wrote an anonymous note to a lecturer who mechanically droned on by reading Stalin’s work verbatim to the class. This was disrespectful to the students, Gorbachev said, since they had already read the book. Gorbachev admitted to writing the note, which touched off an investigation, but no action was taken.
When Stalin died on March 5, 1953, Gorbachev joined the huge mourning crowds in Moscow’s streets. He was “deeply and sincerely moved by Stalin’s death.” But in the years that followed, Gorbachev came to see Stalin differently. On February 25, 1956, Khrushchev delivered his famous “secret speech” at the 20th Party Congress denouncing Stalin’s personality cult and use of violence and persecution. Only after the
speech, Gorbachev recalled, “did I begin to understand the inner connection between what had happened in our country and what had happened to my family.” His grandfather Pantelei had said that Stalin didn’t know of his torture. But maybe Stalin was the one responsible for the family’s pain.
“The document containing Khrushchev’s denunciations circulated briefly within the party, and then it was withdrawn. But I managed to get my hands on it. I was shocked, bewildered and lost. It wasn’t an analysis, just facts, deadly facts. Many of us simply could not believe that such things could be true. For me it was easier. My family had itself been one of the victims of the repression of the 1930s.”
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Gorbachev later frequently called Khrushchev’s speech “courageous.” It was not a total break with the past, but it was a break nonetheless. He felt once again as if illusions about the system were falling away. Gorbachev saw this as a reason to be hopeful, but he was also aware that many people, especially those in an older generation, were skeptical and downright confused. Not everything was clear for Gorbachev, either. How could everything they had believed in be wrong?