Revolution 1989 (20 page)

His birth coincided almost exactly with Stalin’s brutal drive to col lectivise the land, part of the great dictator’s vision of turning backward semi-feudal Russia into the modern, industrial Soviet Union. It was accompanied by appalling suffering throughout the country, but in few areas as terrible as in the north Caucasus, where an estimated one million people died from the famine of the 1930s. The ‘harvest of sorrow’, as it came to be called, was entirely a man-made disaster. Scores of thousands of better-off peasants, the derided
kulaks
who owned smallholdings, were driven off the land or killed. Hunger carried away the others. Gorbachev would later often recall the many ruined houses in his own village where entire families had died from starvation. In the area around Privolnoye a collective farm was established in the summer of 1931 and its first chairman, an important man in the neighbourhood, was Panteley Yefimovich Gopkolo, the new baby Mikhail Gorbachev’s maternal grandfather. He was a strong supporter of socialised farming from conviction as well as from opportunism. When Gorbachev was three, in 1934, his paternal grandfather Andrei was accused of ‘sabotaging the spring sowing plan’. He had refused to join the collective farm - the
kolkhoz
- and a kangaroo court sent him to Siberia to cut trees. He left behind ‘a tormented family’ that soon became destitute, Gorbachev said. ‘Half the family died of starvation.’

He survived mainly due to the position held by his other grandfather. But in 1937, at the height of Stalin’s Great Purge in which millions were murdered or sent to prison camps, Panteley Gopkolo was arrested in the middle of the night by the secret police, the NKVD, and, in the usual language of the time, charged with belonging to ‘an underground right-Trotskyist counter-revolutionary organisation’. Gorbachev recalled later that his grandfather was jailed ‘and interrogated for fourteen months . . . he confessed to things he had not done, and so on. Thank God he survived.’ But home in Privolnoye had ‘become a plague house’ which nobody dared to visit for fear of being associated with an ‘enemy of the people . . . even the neighbours’ kids refused to have anything to do with me. This is something that remained with me for the rest of my life.’ Gopkolo was released and around the time the Germans invaded Russia in 1941 he was rehabilitated. He served for nearly two further decades as chairman of the local collective farm. He insisted until the end of his days that ‘Stalin had no idea what the NKVD is doing’. Gorbachev kept quiet until the 1990s about these skeletons in the family cupboard, as did so many ambitious people of his generation who had similar backgrounds. It would have done no good to his impeccable Party record. Gorbachev’s father was drafted into the army at the start of the war on the eastern front. Gorbachev was only ten and he did not see his father again for more than five years. The nearest big town, Stavropol, was occupied by the Germans, but only for five months. Privolnoye was spared the destruction and barbarity visited on so much of Russia during the Great Patriotic War.

He harboured ambitions at an early age. It was at his own insistence that, aged less than fourteen, he went from the small village school to the bigger secondary school in Krasnogvardeiskoye (Red Guard Town) ten miles away. He walked there each Monday morning, stayed during the week with an elderly couple from whom he rented a room, and walked back on Friday afternoon. At the weekends he worked in the fields with his mother. He shone at school academically, and, as important for his future, politically. The Party spotted his talent and clutched him in an embrace. The Party made him - and he was a true believer, even after the Soviet Communist Party ceased to exist. His main pastime outside school and political work was the stage. He loved acting and was good at it. For a fleeting moment, he thought of a theatrical career. His schoolfriends remember that from a young age he was a natural leader and was highly popular. They recall also that he was remarkably self-assured and confident. Even from adolescence he had a manner that told others he always knew he was right. ‘I remember him correcting teachers in history class,’ his sweetheart at secondary school, Yulia Karagodina, said. ‘Once he was so angry at one teacher he said “Do you want to keep your teaching certificate?” He was the sort who felt he was right and could prove it to anyone.’ How his teachers liked this priggish and pompous part of him we do not know. But, with the support of the Party, he was sent from a tiny, second-rate provincial school to Moscow State University, by far the most select in the country, to study law.

His dissertation for entry to the university was on the subject ‘Stalin is our battle glory, Stalin is the Flight of our youth’. In school holidays he worked on the land and in the summer before he started university he performed two months of arduous back-breaking work in the fields bringing in the harvest, for which he was given an important state honour, the Order of the Red Banner of Labour. But he was not a star when in 1950 he arrived in Moscow. At first he was treated like a country bumpkin. Most of the students were children of the Soviet nomenklatura, more sophisticated and better-connected than he. He worked hard on smoothing out his rougher edges. He was one of the most active members of the Communist Youth organisation, the Komsomol, where his political views, according to his best friend at university, the Czech foreign exchange student Zdenek Mlynár, were strictly orthodox - ‘He was a straight Stalinist, like everyone else at the time.’

In 1953, at a ballroom dancing class early in his third year at the university, Gorbachev met Raisa Maximova Titorenko, a petite, pretty, dark-haired philosophy student a year younger than he was. She was a clever, cultivated and chic young woman - as convinced a Marxist and politically active as himself. For the young Gorbachev it was love at first sight, though she told friends later that it took her a little longer. They were married the next year and remained a devoted couple until she died in 1999. Her influence on him, and on the future of the USSR, was to become immense.

Gorbachev was sent back to his own province at Stavropol, where he was fast-tracked by the Party and destined for high positions. While Raisa taught Marxism at the polytechnic and worked on a PhD thesis on conditions among the peasantry in the collective farms of the Kuban, Gorbachev was rising through the Party ranks at unprecedented speed. One great influence on his career was the ‘secret speech’ in February 1956 by Nikita Khrushchev, who exposed the monstrous crimes of Stalin. It shook the world of Communists such as Gorbachev who, despite their family backgrounds and personal experience, had regarded Stalin as almost a god-like being. Khrushchev attempted to introduce a range of reforms to revive Russia’s already creaking industry and agriculture but encountered so much resistance that he gave up. The couple learned as much from two long holidays in Western Europe during the mid-1960s - the first a 3,000-mile motoring tour around France and the second a Party-sponsored trip to Italy. In the Soviet Union at the time, for a low-to-middle-ranking official and his lecturer wife to be allowed opportunities to travel so freely showed total faith in his loyalty.

In 1967, aged just thirty-five, Gorbachev was promoted to be Party boss of the Stavropol region - effectively ruler of nearly three million people, with a direct line to the top men in the Kremlin. It was still a thousand miles from ‘the Centre’, as Moscow was always called by Party men, but here Gorbachev was a prince in his own domain. Apart from his youth, vigour and efficiency, he had earned a reputation as an incorruptible official in a bureaucracy that was a byword for sleaze and graft.

He must have been insufferably bored surrounded by second- and third-rate bureaucrats in the provinces, but life in Stavropol had benefits and opportunities. The area was regularly visited by many of the senior and sickly men from the Kremlin for its curative waters. The most exclusive spas and clinics for top Party officials were in his region - and Gorbachev made it his business to get to know his celebrity visitors. Among his gifts was an ability to charm and impress older and more powerful men. Two frequent visitors to the Stavropol spas became Gorbachev’s chief mentors - Yuri Andropov and Mikhail Suslov. Word of the younger man’s talents, his energy and above all his
Partinost
(a uniquely Communist word with no precise definition but meaning ‘Party spirit’) spread around Moscow. Gorbachev helped it on its way. He said later that ‘In those years we all licked Brezhnev’s ass, all of us.’

Sycophancy is a vital ingredient of success in all bureaucracies, but never was it as important as during the latter years of the USSR.There are some grotesque examples of Gorbachev ingratiating himself with his superiors in the Kremlin. In May 1978 he wrote a review of a turgid, almost unreadable book produced by Brezhnev’s ghostwriters. Only those with hearts of stone could fail to snigger: ‘L.I. Brezhnev has revealed a talent for leadership of the Leninist type,’ Gorbachev gushed:

Both Andropov and Suslov made sure that Brezhnev was shown the article and had an opportunity to meet its author. Less than six months later Gorbachev was summoned to Moscow to take on one of the top jobs in the Kremlin. He was put in charge of Soviet agriculture, following the sudden death of the powerful magnate Fyodor Kulakov, who had also been a patron of Gorbachev. Gorbachev was now at the centre of power in Moscow on the top leadership rung - nearly a decade younger than any of his colleagues. Raisa was eased into a prestigious academic job as a senior philosophy lecturer at her alma mater, Moscow State University.
⁸

The ambitious men around Gorbachev could all see that he was clever, sharp and able, but nobody knew what he was thinking. As Anatoli Sobchak, who was a rising apparatchik at the same time, said:

Andropov groomed his favourite protégé for the top job, though he suspected that Gorbachev would be considered too young to be chosen immediately after him. But he gave him more responsibility and experience and helped to ensure that when the next vacancy occurred, Gorbachev would be the logical choice. In the brief Chernenko interregnum he was doing much of the day-to-day work running the country. But he needed to raise his profile on the domestic and international stage in order to place the seal on his succession, which he felt sure would not be long. He wanted to organise a visible foreign trip that would get him talked about - and would help to answer some of the criticism from Soviet officials who were worried that as the heir apparent in the Kremlin he had little experience of foreign affairs. He wanted to visit Washington. But that was impossible with the chill in Soviet/US relations, so he angled for a visit to America’s closest ally, Britain, in an attempt to charm an ideological enemy every bit as fervent as Ronald Reagan: the Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher.

She was as keen on receiving him as he was to go. ‘We wanted to get an idea of what the next generation of Soviet leaders might be like and this was a great opportunity,’ said Charles Powell, Thatcher’s foreign policy adviser. ‘We did not know for sure at that stage that Gorbachev would certainly be the man, but it was looking like it. The visit was extraordinary. You could tell from the first moment between Thatcher and Gorbachev that they were very interested in each other . . . there was real chemistry between them.’ He was willing to talk - at great length - about any subject and though he did not say anything new or particularly significant about the state of the world, it was the way he said it that counted. Thatcher famously declared, ‘I like Mr Gorbachev. We can do business together’ and his two-day visit to London in November 1984 marked the beginning of Gorbachev’s seduction of the Western media. He was clearly a novel kind of Soviet politician, personable, amusing, approachable, rather than grim-faced and lugubrious like the figures the West had come to know. Raisa, elegant, stylishly dressed and visibly his consort, was entirely different from the traditional frumpy Kremlin wife usually kept carefully in the background.
¹⁰

Gorbachev had a few weeks earlier impressed the French President, François Mitterrand, who was visiting Moscow, for his cleverness and agile mind, but also for his sense of humour and wit, not normally associated with Russian officials. Gorbachev arrived a little late to a meeting at the Kremlin attended by Mitterrand and the French Senator Claude Estier, who was accompanying the French leader. ‘Gorbachev bustled in, sat down at the table and apologised for being late,’ Estier recalled. ‘He said he had been trying to sort out a problem in the Soviet agricultural sector. I asked him when the problem had arisen and he quipped in a flash: In 1917.’
¹¹

But the Kremlin potentates had not chosen the new supreme leader for his repartee. They believed he was a Party man and thought that with his relative youth and energy he would defend with vigour the interests of the Soviet empire. That was what he promised to do in his brief acceptance remarks after he was anointed: ‘There is no need to change policy,’ he said. ‘The existing course is the true, the correct and genuinely Leninist one . . . the most important thing is to keep our relations strong with the rest of the great socialist camp.’ His colleagues were prepared for some modest reforms. They were not expecting years of revolutionary change. Mikhail Gorbachev was a Communist through and through. He did not seem then like the man who would do more than anybody else to destroy communism.