فصل 10

PART II

DEMOCRATIC VISTAS

CHAPTER 10

MASQUERADE

After the Bolsheviks sacked the Winter Palace and seized power in 1917, they still had an empire to win. To help conquer the hearts and minds of the people, Lenin declared cinema the most important of the arts and sent propaganda films and projectionists by train across Russia to advertise the Revolution. Stalin, too, saw the value of the new art. Though his preferred instrument of enculturation was the pistol, he told the Communist Party that cinema was “the greatest means of mass agitation.” And so for years after the Great October, workers and peasants in makeshift tent-theaters and railroad cars watched The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks, Strike, October, and Kino-Eye, imbibing all the while the spirit of revolution.

But with new revolutions come new media. When Gorbachev rose to power in 1985, his chief ideologist and propagandist, Aleksandr Yakovlev, declared, “The television image is everything.” Yakovlev had been for ten years an ambassador in Canada, and he often sat at home in Ottawa, watching the Canadian and American networks. Yakovlev also studied television in Moscow. For years he worked in the Central Committee’s ideology department. Better than anyone around him, he understood the potential of television as an instrument of persuasion, coercion, and homogenization in an empire as vast as the Soviet Union.

Though the Soviet Union was poor and primitive, nearly everyone had a television. Everyone watched. Yakovlev understood that if there was one ritual that could unite Baltic intellectuals and Siberian peasants, it was television. Above all, he understood the essential value of Vremya (“Time”), the official evening news program, a prime-time ritual for nearly 200 million people every night of the week.

Stalin had been an untelevised tyrant. He was like some magical Eastern god, unseen, rarely heard. The media technology of the day allowed him easy control of his own cult. To a great extent, Stalin’s cult was a phenomenon of print: histories, newspapers, textbooks, posters. It was so easy to manipulate. His photographs in Pravda were retouched. Pockmarks disappeared. He grew a head taller. It was impossible to tell he had a withered arm.

But as the system loosened somewhat and technology advanced, the people of the Soviet Union came to know the leaders of the post-Stalin era—Khrushchev and Brezhnev—more intimately, mainly through television and the evening news. Vremya was an invention of the Central Committee in the sixties. It was a product designed to be the high mass of a closed, atheist state. The Party ideologists shaped the look and sound of the program with painstaking care. After a long search, they discovered their Big Brother in Igor Kirillov, an unassuming actor of deceptive skill. For twenty years, Kirillov would anchor Vremya. He was slender and wore serious glasses, giving him the unthreatening look of a kindly teacher of mathematics. Such was the public face of the Kremlin.

Kirillov was the master of his own voice and presence. Using the slightest gesture or shift in intonation, he made the declarations of the Central Committee seem the revealed wisdom of heaven; he could also report the most ordinary events in the capitalist West as if they were scandals against humanity, a mockery of all that was good and decent. Above all, he commanded attention. “Today, in the Politburo …” Kirillov would begin gravely, and every subject would listen, waiting for instruction.

Kirillov, like so many servants of ideology, went through a conversion experience born of necessity under Gorbachev. When I saw him at the state television studios in 1991, Big Brother wore a sweater and the hound-dog look of repentance. He was grateful for a second chance, and now introduced various youth programs. He apologized for himself constantly and wore his cardigan as if it were sackcloth. “The sweater shows I’ve changed,” he said. “The system survived as long as it did thanks to the ideological service of the Communist Party and television. It was a kind of mass hypnosis.” For that Kirillov seemed genuinely sorry.

Kirillov had been chosen for his great role thanks to his training in the Stanislavsky Method. “I had the ability to make people believe,” he said. Kirillov remembered being overcome with emotion in 1961 when Khrushchev declared on television that the Soviet Union would achieve Communism in his lifetime. “And as Khrushchev spoke those words, the sun came out—and the entire Hall of Congresses seemed to light up. See, we told each other, even nature believes in our cause. That’s when my wife and I decided to have our first daughter. We hoped that she would live under Communism. Now I am ashamed that I was used as a marionette and that, through me and through television, a fog was created in the minds of the people.” The producers of Vremya knew precisely how to create an imagery of empire and to win over, or at least befuddle, the people. They surrounded Kirillov with the aural and visual symbols of Bolshevik grandeur. When the question arose about what music to use for the opening of the show, the TV ideologists immediately ruled out Mozart and Beethoven. To use German music would have violated the Russian imperial spirit.

“The opening showed the Kremlin as the symbol of empire. The idea was for information to flow from this mighty pinnacle downward,” said Eduard Sagalayev, who ran Vremya for a while under Gorbachev. “Vremya was a medium not only to convey information but also to give instructions, especially to provincial Party leaders and to the most ordinary person. It was the singular connection between supreme authority and the people. I personally saw letters from old ladies addressed to Igor Kirillov saying, ‘Please, dear Igor Leonidovich, tell Gorbachev to do such-and-such.’ Kirillov was for many people right between general secretary and the Lord God. In fact, he was higher than general secretary, because, after all, it was Vremya that prescribed precisely how to live. Kirillov would read the decrees of the Central Committee without any editing or compression, for such decrees were on the order of the Ten Commandments. It was a biblical phenomenon. How could Moses compress the commandments God had handed down to the Israelites?” The rituals on Vremya were always repeated precisely. Even during the Gorbachev era, there was little room for improvisation. If the general secretary was leaving for a trip abroad, the producers of Vremya knew precisely how to portray the scene. First, the establishing shot at the airport with a red banner reading “Long Live the Party”; then the Politburo members in their hats and overcoats coming out of the building to wait by the plane; then the general secretary himself saying good-bye, kissing each of his comrades on the cheek; then the general secretary at the top of the airplane stairs, waving farewell.

“Faith was the issue,” Sagalayev said. “People swallowed the stereotypes they were fed, they believed everything was all right, everything was fine, as long as the rituals were in place. Even the kisses at the airport were a cause for pride and joy. Provincial Party secretaries watched and dreamed of the day when they’d be shown on television, leaving for Zimbabwe.” In Brezhnev’s dotage—an interminable stretch on the critical list—Vremya began to work against him. For a man who could barely function in office, television was a cruel medium. Leonid Parfyonov, a popular television host in the glasnost era, told me with just a touch of irony that after Andrei Sakharov, the most effective dissident of the 1970s was Vremya. “It was only then that people could see how decrepit our leaders were,” he said. “They’d watch Brezhnev talking, losing his place in his speeches, mumbling like an old man falling apart, and they began to think: ‘This is the leader of our great state?’ It had never been like that.” Not a few viewers understood Brezhnev’s deterioration as a new symbol: the symbol of the deterioration of the Soviet Union itself.

Gorbachev knew that he could use Vremya, and television in general, to create a public image of himself as new kind of czar. His image, and no other, would embody his policy. Television was still his tool, his to use as he liked. In his first major public appearance as general secretary, a speech in Leningrad, Gorbachev was so vigorous compared to his predecessors, so critical of the status quo, so informal and unembarrassed by his southern accent and grammatical slips, that he was quickly dubbed “the chairman of the collective farm.” On television, Gorbachev dove into crowds. No one had to know that the KGB had carefully screened those crowds or that the producers had carefully edited the footage to the general secretary’s own specifications. The entire state media apparatus was dedicated not to reporting the news but rather to the evolution of a personality and the promotion of a policy, a new way of doing things.

The Kremlin inner circle was obsessed with Gorbachev’s television image. Just before airtime, Sagalayev said, Gorbachev himself frequently called the Vremya producers at the studio to go over the details of his appearance. No editing, no visual image or remark, was left to the judgment of anyone but Gorbachev and his aides. “Gorbachev’s image,” Sagalayev said, “was carefully planned and organized with the help of the KGB, Gorbachev’s staff, and the ideology department of the Central Committee. And most of all, Yakovlev and Raisa Maksimovna helped develop the new image of the general secretary—open, democratic. They wanted him to resemble Lenin, for Lenin’s image was that of a simple man who received ordinary people and peasants and drove in a car with no bodyguards. They wanted perestroika to be a return to Leninism, a purification of the Party from Stalinism and totalitarianism.” Every night, people would turn on Vremya, and, inevitably, Gorbachev would be up to something: speaking off the cuff at a provincial Party meeting, wading through crowds in New Delhi or Bonn, greeting a foreign delegation in a room with a green baize table and a red runner carpet. Gorbachev was never interviewed in the conventional Western sense. A nervous state broadcaster, carefully briefed, would ask a fuzzy, open-ended question (“Mikhail Sergeyevich, what hopes do you have for your trip to London?”), and then Gorbachev would go on for fifteen or twenty minutes. By mid-1987 at the latest, urban intellectuals especially sat in front of the television watching this new figure, captivated, a little bit in love. The intellectuals were like film critics who, after sitting through years of depressing schlock, were suddenly shown a print of Citizen Kane.

Probably the height of Gorbachev’s television career, in Soviet eyes, was his performance at the Nineteenth Party Conference. Not only did he read his own part well, he also directed “spontaneity” to his advantage, sending up obscure speakers to excoriate and embarrass hidebound Politburo members, setting Ligachev up against Yeltsin to enhance his own stature as the wise, liberal center flanked by ideological and emotional extremes.

Never again would Gorbachev’s mastery be so complete; never would he be as in control of the spectacle of politics. But for several years, Gorbachev not only was the lead actor, producer, and director in his nightly drama, he also had no competition. Vremya played on all the main channels. The educational channel’s Italian lessons were not exactly an ideological challenge. For nearly four years, there were no competing political actors to speak of. None, that is, who had access to prime time. Yeltsin did not really appear until June 1988, and even then the focus of his attack was Ligachev, not Gorbachev. Sakharov also did not get much airtime until mid-1989. And the right wing was still too bound by the traditions of Communist Party discipline to go on television in the spirit of contradiction.

Gorbachev was a lecturer, a cajoler. At conferences and in his meetings on the street, he was a relentless pedant. But for all his power and self-possession, Gorbachev did allow a bit of humor about himself. This, too, was revolutionary. Political humor had always been a staple of private life in the Soviet Union, starring Brezhnev as the doddering fool or the corpse of Lenin as kopchushka, the “smoked fish.” But such jokes were never permitted in official publications. In the March 1988 issue of Teatr, the satirist Mikhail Zadornov adopted the voice of a resident of a town Gorbachev had just visited. He writes a letter to the general secretary telling him how the once dingy town had been transformed. “It is true that you informed our local authorities about your visit just three days in advance,” the mock letter to Gorbachev says, “but even in those three days they managed to do more for our city than they had in all the years of Soviet power. All the buildings that you were supposed to pass were painted, but then someone said that you like to swerve off your planned course and so our authorities were obliged to paint all the other houses in the city. They worked so hard that they painted the windows, too.” The joke was less on Gorbachev than on the vanity of the Communist Party and the Russian tradition of Potemkin villages. But a year later, as glasnost expanded farther beyond the strict control of the Politburo, the humor cut deeper and Kremlin patience wore a bit thin. The Gorbachev family was no longer amused. On the stage of the Satire Theater, one of the actors starring in Vladimir Voinovich’s political satire The Tribunal, Vyacheslav Bezrukov, spun out a long and hilarious imitation of Gorbachev, complete with his signature hand motions (karate chops, raised index finger), odd grammar, and accent. Gorbachev’s daughter, Irina, was sitting in the third row, and she had been laughing throughout the show. But when Bezrukov started his Gorbachev imitation, Irina scowled. The moment the curtain fell, she headed for the exit, unsmiling, not applauding.

Gorbachev did not shut down any theaters, but he did guard his image, and his life, jealously. Despite his policy of democratization, he never suffered the scrutiny of a real political campaign, much less the assault of a hungry press corps in search of his “character.” Gorbachev’s climb to power took place inside the Soviet Communist Party, an institution that valued aggressive obedience and secrecy. The initiator of glasnost revealed little of himself except through political performance. When it came to unsanctioned exploration of his personality and his past, Gorbachev was not, at first, much more forthcoming than his predecessors. Even the most liberal papers and magazines did not dare publish what a Westerner would call a profile. Gorbachev insisted on communicating directly with the Soviet people, and the only filter permitted would be the one that he and his staff designed and approved.

For all his support of glasnost, for all his talk of the need to fill in the “blank spots” of history, Gorbachev kept to himself a central fact of his early life for more than five years after coming to power. It was only in December 1990, when he was alienating the entire liberal intelligentsia, including Shevardnadze and Yakovlev, by cooperating with the hard-liners in the Party, that Gorbachev revealed that both of his grandfathers had been repressed under Stalin. You had to be listening carefully to catch it. Late one night, Central Television broadcast a tape of one of Gorbachev’s meetings with a large group of leading writers and journalists. Somehow, Gorbachev was trying to justify his swing to the right but at the same time to win back the respect of the intelligentsia.

“Look at my two grandfathers,” Gorbachev said. “One was denounced for not fulfilling the sowing plan in 1933, a year when half the family died of hunger.…” Why now? Why hadn’t he said anything in 1988 when the battle for history had been raging?

“… They took him away to Irkutsk to a timber-producing camp, and the rest of the family was broken, half-destroyed in that year. And the other grandfather—he was an organizer of collective farms, later a local administrator. This was quite a figure for those times. He was from a peasant family, a peasant of average means. He was in prison for fourteen months. They interrogated him, demanded that he admit what he’d never done. Thank God, he survived. But when he returned home, people considered his house a plague house, a house of an ‘enemy of the people.’ Relatives and dear ones were not able to visit him, otherwise ‘they’ would have come after them, too.” It was as if Gorbachev’s family was a paradigm of the Stalinist era: one grandfather was punished for failing to fulfill the absurd and brutal demands of collectivization; the other, a leader of collectivization, suffered for no reason other than to be a victim of Stalin’s scheme of organized, random terror. “When I was up for membership in the Communist Party, I had to answer for all this,” Gorbachev told me later, in an interview. “It was a very painful moment.” Throughout the speech, Gorbachev made plain that he himself was the leader of a particular generation with a particular vision: a man of late middle age, born into a system that betrayed his family, but one who is convinced nevertheless that “genuine” socialism was possible and still “my banner.” The tragedy of the Stalin era and the farce of the Brezhnev period represented for Gorbachev not the failure of ideology, but rather its perversion.

But Gorbachev had not finished. There was a reason for his revelation. It turned out that he had saved his confession for traditional ends. “I’ve been told more than once that it is time to stop swearing allegiance to socialism,” he was saying now. “Why should I? Socialism is my deep conviction, and I will promote it as long as I can talk and work.” By late 1990, political opinion polls showed that only a minority of Soviet people—not more than 20 percent—still shared Gorbachev’s faith in the efficacy of socialism. But attempts to turn away from the “socialist choice” were inconceivable to Gorbachev—a betrayal, a “counterrevolution on the sly.” The Baltic independent movements were a threat to his notion of the Soviet Union as “one people”; he saw the calls for private property as a threat to the psychology of a people who spent years being taught to despise it. The opposition to such foreign ideas, he said, were “last stands,” comparable to the battles of Moscow and Stalingrad.

“Am I supposed to turn my back on my grandfather, who was committed to the [socialist] idea?… And I cannot go against my father, who defended Kursk, forded the Dnieper River knee-deep in blood, and was wounded in Czechoslovakia. When cleansing myself of Stalinism and all other filth, should I renounce my grandfather and my father and all they did?” In 1989, I traveled to the scene of Gorbachev’s youth, the southern Russian city of Stavropol and the farming villages nearby. When I showed up at the Hotel Kavkaz, a forbidding old woman with bandaged legs sat squat on a stool, her gaze set on me, barring the door. I tried to get an explanation from her but I could not.

“You’ll have to excuse us, but we’re having a mass killing in there,” said a voice over my shoulder. The local tourist guide, Valentin Nizin, as it turned out. “We’re wiping out the cockroach population. But don’t worry. When you get to your room, I’m sure you won’t be disappointed.” Nizin was right. Roach platoons raced down the linoleum in columns.

Nizin, who seemed like something more than a tour guide, was extremely interested in why I had come to Stavropol “when there are hundreds of other places for you to go in the Soviet Union.” Except to protect friends and sources, I did not conceal much when reporting in the Soviet Union, even in conversations with people I took to be informers. I printed nearly everything I knew anyway. So I told Nizin that I was there to learn what I could about Gorbachev’s past. I was not the first, and Nizin kindly helped me find a few of Gorbachev’s old friends in town. But when I said I wanted to go to Privolnoye, the village nearby where Gorbachev was born and raised, Nizin stiffened. He would get back to me on that, he said, and disappeared into his office.

Within an hour, he told me I could not go.

“There is a quarantine in Privolnoye,” he said. “It is forbidden to you.” “What sort of quarantine?”

“The cows are diseased, apparently. They do not want any foreigners to come and get sick.” “The cows are against it?”

“No,” Nizin said. “Not the cows.”

I knew very well what this meant and could guess with even more accuracy with whom Comrade Nizin had just been talking. But I was tired and angry, and so I pushed things a bit too far.

“Mr. Nizin, I do not plan to interview any cows, nor do I plan to exchange fluids with one. I told the Foreign Ministry I was going to Privolnoye and they had no objections, and I don’t believe there is any quarantine.” “Oh, but there is,” he said. “Hoof and mouth disease.”

Or whatever. Nizin smiled and shrugged in a way to let me know that he knew that I knew, but that was too bad, you’ll have to limit yourself to the city, where we can keep a good eye on you. It was no use, and we both knew it. I gave up, bought Nizin a drink, set my alarm for 5:00 A.M., and went to bed.

When I woke it was snowing, fat flakes that whitened the grim city. I dressed quickly and walked past the concierge, who was slumped in her chair and snoring. The halls still stank of pesticide, and there were still roaches, thousands of them skittering along the linoleum.

On the street, I got lucky. I was looking to hire a car, and I found one after only fifteen minutes or so. A tiny orange Zhiguli with bald tires and a smashed windshield pulled over. Perfect. It would not have been so smart to go to Gorbachev-land in a bright yellow taxi. I got in the car and quickly explained to the driver, a young farmer out to make some extra money before breakfast, where I wanted to go. When he squinted quizzically, I added that I was willing to pay $25 in hard currency, a sum that would surely put him in feed until harvest time. Off we went.

The driver and I figured that it would be best if we just drove through Privolnoye to get a quick look and then went to Krasnogvardeiskoye, a much larger town where Gorbachev went to high school, entered Communist Party politics, and fell in love. If I was still undetected after talking to people there, we’d stop in Privolnoye on the way back to Stavropol. With so many KGB men around, my luck would surely run out; it was just a question of when.

The road was among the most beautiful I’d ever seen in the Soviet Union, including the Georgian Military Highway through the Caucasus and the flat road through the Kara Kum desert in Turkmenia. Snow dusted the rich fields like confectioner’s sugar over a Black Forest cake. In two hours of driving, we passed more horse carts than automobiles. Peasant women with silver teeth, humped backs, and mud-covered boots led cows down the side of the road. The lushness of the farmland seemed to me the very soil of Gorbachev’s optimism. “You could shove a stick in the ground around here and you’d get a harvest,” people told me in Stavropol, and now I could believe it.

Privolnoye was not much different from the village before it and the one after. Peasant huts, livestock, fields. The air was cold and sweet with the smell of fertilizer, hay, and loam. There was one paved road and some dirt ones, all near the muddy stream known as the Yegorlik River. A black bull was tethered to the green fence surrounding Gorbachev’s first schoolhouse. Ducks and geese waddled down the road.

Privolnoye, which is roughly translated as “free and easy,” could no longer be called an entirely typical village. Not when the KGB was in town keeping a close watch on the white brick house with blue-green shutters where Gorbachev’s mother, Maria Panteleyevna Gorbacheva, lived. Gorbachev’s mother was in her late seventies, a stout and friendly-looking woman in support hose. Her accent was southern, a peasant’s accent. The KGB took great pains to shield her from journalists, but she did appear on television on one of Gorbachev’s birthdays, informing the nation that young Misha had worked hard on the farm, read all the books in the collective farm library, and played a mean balalaika. “And my how he could sing!” According to people I met who have lived in the village and in villages nearby, Maria Panteleyevna rarely went out anymore. A few years later, when her son was on the brink of resignation, she said perhaps that might not be so bad, since he’d had no time to visit her in years. Accustomed to the pace and the faces of the village, Maria Panteleyevna had always refused Gorbachev’s requests to move to Moscow. She did have a few modern conveniences that had not been around when her son lived there: television, indoor plumbing. She was too old to care for the animals anymore. “She said, ‘At least let me keep the rooster so I’ll get up in the morning,’ ” Georgi Gorlov, an old family friend, told me.

At the very moment when Gorbachev was born in March 1931, southern Russia and Ukraine were living through the collectivization campaign and the starvation that went along with it. According to Western studies, more than thirty thousand people in the Stavropol region died during the terror-famine of 1931–32. Despite the horror of those years, Gorbachev, like so many “reform Communists,” believed in the idea of collective farms, but abhorred what Bukharin called the “Genghis Khan” methods of Stalin.

Without plunging into the puddle of psychohistory, one might fairly say that Gorbachev’s early sense of himself as a success was tied to the collective farm. Working with his father and the family of fellow farmworker Aleksandr Yakovenko, Gorbachev spent his teenage summers on a rickety S-80 combine harvesting grain. It was hard and filthy work, usually under a broiling southern sun. To cool off, the two boys, Gorbachev and Yakovenko, stripped and sat in barrels of river water. The Gorbachev-Yakovenko team was a local success, so much so that they earned a banner headline in the June 20, 1948, edition of the Road of Ilyich, the local newspaper: “Comrade Gorbachev Is Ready to Harvest.” The next year, while Gorbachev was in high school, the team won a coveted honor, the Medal of the Red Banner. Such an honor was the first step toward a life in the Party. Many years later, when he was the regional Party leader in Stavropol, Gorbachev would visit the farms in the region and stun his traveling party when old farming friends like the shepherd Vasily Rudenko would greet him with a bear hug and “Hey, Misha! Have you eaten?” With that, they would march into Rudenko’s hut for a plate of jellied innards and a bowl of borshch.

After the brief and unnerving driving tour of Privolnoye, we headed for the town of Krasnogvardeiskoye, or “Red Guard.” Gorbachev knew this stretch of road well. Four decades before, he woke early in his parents’ house, a two-room hut made of mud, manure, and straw with pigs and chickens and an outhouse in the yard. The harvest was over. The village schools were opening. Gorbachev tucked a package of home-grown food under his arm, met up with his friend Dmitri Markov, and began the walk to Krasnogvardeiskoye’s High School No. 1. Gorbachev rented a bed in the house of an old retired couple there. Weekends he returned home to Privolnoye to work in the fields.

The two-story brick high school fast became the center of Gorbachev’s universe. He was the classic small-town overachiever, a class-president type who scored high marks, starred in the school plays, and won the heart of the best-looking girl in the school. For half a day, I buzzed around the town, talking to teachers, old friends, people on the street. There was, of course, something preposterous about the entire mission, something straight out of the old television series This Is Your Life. Yekaterina Chaika, Gorbachev’s old chemistry teacher, was one of several people to deliver twinkling remembrances and boilerplate as if on cue. “He is a man of his time,” she said, “and there are countless factors of history that come into play. But if you want to understand him better as a man, it doesn’t hurt to know where he came from. Like anyone, he has roots. And those roots are right here.” Others who probably did not know him at all conjured visions of the ideal. “You know,” one man told me, “I don’t think Mikhail Sergeyevich even had that birthmark on his head when he was here.” But there were others in town who had something to show me. The high school principal was Oleg Sredni, a man at least fifteen years younger than Gorbachev. He seemed unfazed by the prospect of helping an uninvited foreigner find out more about the general secretary of the Communist Party.

“You want to see Mikhail Sergeyevich’s grades?” he said. “I think we have them here in the safe.” Plump and graceful, Sredni darted across his office to the safe and brought out a musty, Dickensian ledger. He opened to 1950, the year of Gorbachev’s graduation, and there, in a formal hand and cloudy ink, was “Gorbachev, Mikhail Sergeyevich” and a line of numbers. On a grade scale with 5 being the highest to 1 the lowest, Gorbachev had a nearly uninterrupted row of 5s: algebra, Russian literature, trigonometry, history of the Soviet Union, the Soviet Constitution, astronomy, and so on. The one blemish was a 4 in German. “Apparently his class in Privolnoye refused to take German after the war, so he was a bit behind when he got here,” Sredni said in a tone of churchly reverence. “That is why he got the silver medal here, not the gold.” Except for the portrait of Gorbachev on Sredni’s office wall, the school had not paid much attention to honoring their native son. In the school’s hall of fame, Gorbachev was listed as just one medal winner among many, a future general secretary next to Gennadi Fateyev, the class poet. I had been to high schools in the United States where third-rate quarterbacks have been honored more grandly. Sredni had made sure there would be no personality cult in the halls of his school.

“In our day there were lots of pictures of Stalin, of course. I remember one especially, a portrait of Stalin and Mao called The Great Friendship,” said Yuri Serikov, one of Gorbachev’s classmates and now a history teacher at the school. “It was absurd, but what did we know?” Gorbachev was a Soviet Best Boy, with conventional ambitions and ideas. He was the leader of the school’s Komsomol organization and became a candidate for membership in the Communist Party when he was only eighteen. He was no high school rebel. “We were told that Stalin was doing everything perfectly, and we believed it all,” Yuri Serikov said. “That was our level of understanding, and Mikhail Sergeyevich was no exception. None of us ever thought twice about it.” After interviewing fifteen or twenty people in town, the inevitable happened: the KGB caught up with me. Sredni, the school principal, took a phone call while I was in his office. “Da,” he said grimly. And da three or four times more, all with the same dead tone of obedience. He hung up the receiver and, lifting his eyes to me, said, “I’m afraid I can’t talk with you anymore. Please wait here.” Someone had obviously called the authorities, and I was soon summoned to the office of the deputy Communist Party chief, the head chief being out of town on business. The deputy chief had a caveman brow and never smiled. When I told him that I had heard no objections from the Foreign Ministry in Moscow to my coming to the countryside, the deputy chief did not betray the slightest emotion.

“You will get in your car, and proceed directly to Stavropol,” he said.

“What about Privolnoye?” I said. “I told the foreign ministry I’d go there, too.” “As you know, there is a quarantine.”

“What quarantine?”

“You know very well. You were told.”

“And how do you know that?”

The deputy chief blinked once, slowly, to indicate annoyance. I was not to be childish, he seemed to say. He had no time. He had an entire town to run into the ground before the year was out.

Before leaving Krasnogvardeiskoye, I had asked a dozen people if Gorbachev had a girlfriend when he was in school. Everyone remembered the same name: Yuliya Karagodina. “Very pretty, if I remember.” “Played the Snowgirl in the play with Mikhail Sergeyevich.” When I asked one local Communist Party official if she had Karagodina’s number, she smiled girlishly, conspiratorily, and gave it to me.

Yuliya Karagodina, it turned out, had long ago moved to Moscow, where she was divorced, living with her mother, and teaching at a chemistry institute. When I called and asked to see her, Yuliya, as she asked me to call her, was nervous, but quickly agreed. “Make sure you use ‘Karagodina,’ my maiden name, and don’t tell any other reporters my number. I knew this would happen sooner or later. I’ll tell you everything and that’ll be it.” A few days later, we met in a basement laboratory at her institute. Yuliya was no longer beautiful, not even a match for the woman she faintly regarded as the victor, Raisa Maksimovna. She was middle-aged, matronly, and sweet.

“Was it love?” I said.

“It was love, yes it was, for both of us,” she said. “I was attracted to him, he was magnetic. But I’d be upset if you thought that our relationship was like those that young people have now. It just wasn’t that way. We were close friends, and we cared for each other and helped each other. It was—what would you say?—a specific kind of friendship, not just a Komsomol thing. Young love, you might call it. We met for the first time in the September he arrived at school, and after a few months we grew closer. He once told me that he had liked a blond girl named Talia in Privolnoye, but that was more a child’s affection.

“You know, it’s funny, but whenever I watch him now on television leading the Supreme Soviet, I think of Misha in school, playing the Grand Prince in Lermontov’s Masquerade or heading the morning gym class, shouting into a big megaphone: ‘Ready, class! Hup, two, three, four! Hup, two, three, four!’ He was fearless for someone that age. I remember him correcting teachers in history class, and 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, be it in the principal’s office or at a Komsomol meeting.” Yuliya said she had grown up in a village much like Privolnoye a few miles down the road. Her mother was a widowed schoolteacher, and so their circumstances were more modest than Gorbachev’s. Yuliya put her briefcase on the table and took out a huge sheaf of old photographs. In pictures of the young drama costars, Gorbachev was dark and regal in his homemade costume and fake mustache. Karagodina was wide-eyed, delicate, a bit faraway. She looked like Lillian Gish in Broken Blossoms.

As Yuliya leafed through the pictures, slowly, like a child dealing cards, she said, “Once we were rehearsing Ostrovsky’s play The Snowgirl. And there is a point when the Snowgirl—that was me—says, ‘Dear Czar, ask me a hundred times if I love him, and I will answer a hundred times that I do.’ I said those lines in open rehearsal, with the principal sitting right there in the audience. Suddenly, Gorbachev leaned over and whispered in my ear, ‘Is it true?’ My God! I was shaken. I could hardly go on with my monologue. Everyone was asking what had happened, and there was Gorbachev off to the side, smiling. Sometimes we spoke rather roughly to each other, but I was so dumbfounded, I couldn’t answer.

“The truth is, he was a very good actor. There was a time when he even talked with me, and his friends Boris Gladskoi and Gennadi Donskoi, about trying for a theatrical institute. But I think he really always wanted to be a lawyer.

“We never really spoke about the future, except that we would go to Moscow and study there together. I’ll tell you the truth. If we had been well dressed, well fed, and had everything like this generation, then maybe we would have talked about such things. But they were hard times, and we concentrated on our studies.… “I was very proud and poor. Gorbachev was better off. He was better dressed. During the war, my family had been evacuated from Krasnodar to the Stavropol region. Gorbachev’s family were living in their own house on their own soil. They always had enough to eat. He once invited me to come meet his parents in Privolnoye. I said that I had been brought up in such a way that I could not do such a thing. I was too proud. I think I must have felt that his parents would feel that I was offering myself to them.… I just imagined how they would look at me, a simple little girl.

“But Misha did visit my own home. At first we lived in a dugout hut, and then in a small house that we built ourselves. He had the bravery to tell my mother he liked me, but I kind of lied to my mother and said the two of us were just solving the problems of the Komsomol together. He spent the night on a little bed in the house, and I stayed with neighbors.

“He could be so cool and businesslike sometimes. Once at a Komsomol meeting, in front of everyone at the local cinema house, he was angry with me for not finishing on time a little newspaper we put out. And despite our friendship, he reprimanded me in front of everyone, saying that I’d failed, that I was late. He was shouting a bit, disciplining me. Then afterward it was as if nothing had happened. He said, ‘Let’s go to the movies.’ I was at a loss. I couldn’t understand why he did what he did, and I said so. He said, ‘My dear, one thing has nothing to do with another.’ “That reminds me: Years later I was living way outside of the city with my mother, and the commute was very long and we had hardly any room. By then Gorbachev was in the Central Committee. And so I wrote him a letter, asking him to help me. I wanted to get permission to move into the city center and get an apartment. I reminded him who I was, in case he had forgotten. I got the letter back soon after, and on it he had written simply that it wasn’t his area, it wasn’t his job, and that I should apply to the city authorities, not him. Just like that, so businesslike. Not one warm word. Deep in my heart I had hoped he would help me, but I suppose he wanted to avoid even the appearance of favoritism.

“In school, it was all very innocent. We never said things like ‘I love you’ to each other. He would never say such things. And on the rare times he put his arm around my shoulder, as if to say, come, let’s go to the movies or somewhere, I would kind of glance over at his hand. No, it wasn’t like our young people today. I finished school first, and went off first to Moscow. But I had no money and could not find any place to live. Remember, this was still a hard time, and so I returned to my village to work as a teacher. I’ve always thought that Gorbachev somehow thought I was weak for having come home.

“When he went off to the law faculty of Moscow State University, he wrote letters to me telling me how much he liked Moscow and the abundance of things and the fascinating people. There was never a sense in his letters that he felt any lack of confidence because he was a village boy. There were many letters, and later, when I was married, my husband was so jealous he burned them all. I suppose he didn’t know Misha would be general secretary. I’m so sorry those letters are all gone.

“I’ll tell you how it was. I think in the end I felt I was not really good enough for him, or we didn’t really fit. He was too energetic, too serious, so organized. And he was smarter than I was. He was the center of attention. We drifted apart. Things were getting lost. But he did send me a letter at the end with his picture, and on it he wrote ‘Dum spiro spero,’ Latin for ‘While I am breathing, I am hoping.’ I suppose I didn’t want to acknowledge that he was getting farther than me in life, so I said to myself, ‘Okay, Misha, live and write as you like, but as for me …’ I accepted a job in the Soviet far east, but even before I got there, on the road so to say, I was married.

“The few people now who know that Misha and I were good friends sometimes ask me about Raisa Maksimovna. I like Raisa. She plays her role very well. She’s intelligent, and there’s obviously a lot of love there between the two of them. She helps him greatly, that’s clear enough. I’m not envious of her. I cannot say I am glad, just that my destiny is my destiny. I see things as a realist. When I do think back to those days, I see it as a pleasant island of time. Sometimes when I watch him on television I think to myself, ‘Poor Mikhail Sergeyevich. He is so tired, and he has the weight of the world on his shoulders. If he could only take out ten minutes and just be Misha for a while.’ I think of how nice everything was back then. I see that moon in the country sky, and the little river and everything was so lovely.” Gorbachev came to Moscow in September 1950. At Moscow State University, where he would study law until 1955, he took a room with six others at the Stromynka student dormitory. The crumbling, overcrowded dorm had once been a barracks for the soldiers of Peter the Great. Gorbachev had one jacket and one pair of decent pants to put in his closet. “Gorbachev was a villager, and you might have expected him to seem worse off than the city boys, but we were all poor then, and our new surroundings were no better,” said Rudolf Kolchanov, an editor at the labor newspaper Trud, who roomed with Gorbachev for three years.

Zdenek Mlynar, a Czech Communist and another of Gorbachev’s college friends, arrived at the same time in Moscow as an exchange student from Prague and recalled a Moscow of “poverty and backwardness … a huge village of wooden cottages” where people had barely enough to eat, where “most families lived in one room and instead of flush toilets there was only an opening leading directly to a drainpipe.” In his memoir of the Prague Spring, Mlynar wrote that in Moscow at the time “what you didn’t hold on to tightly would be stolen from you in a crowd, drunks lay unconscious in the streets and could be dead for all the passersby knew or cared.” Dressed in his baggy, hayseed clothes, Gorbachev tried doggedly to catch up with students who had gone to superior schools in the city. He often returned from the library at one or two in the morning and then stayed up another couple of hours talking with his roommates. Mlynar, Gorbachev, Kolchanov, and six war veterans would lock the door, turn a portrait of Stalin to the wall—revealing on the back an amateur portrait of a czarist-era courtesan—and drink and talk the night away. “Yes, it could be grim and wild even,” Kolchanov said. “But Gorbachev seemed to avoid drinking too much. He was fastidious that way. That dorm room may have been the greatest classroom for all of us. We talked about everything from girls to more serious things: the latest exhibition or the latest artistic awards or historical event. Of course, one subject that was never mentioned was Stalin himself. That was too risky, even with the door closed.” The law class was dominated by some older vets and younger men, like Gorbachev, who had won academic medals in high schools. Unlike the politics or history departments, the law departments provided their students, by the standards of the time, with a relatively wide reading list. Along with the standard diet of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin, students read many of the essential works of Western thought: Roman law, Locke’s treatises on government, Rousseau’s Social Contract, and even the U.S. Constitution. But those texts served mainly as relics of bourgeois liberalism, and the core readings, the holy writ, were Stalinist textbooks.

Gorbachev, who as general secretary would campaign for a “law-base state,” was steeped in the theory of its opposite: Stalinism. “The theme of political crimes was touched upon only in very brief and general terms,” according to Mlynar. “There was nothing complex about it, as long as you accepted the fundamental principle that political activity upsetting to the government was comparable to any other form of criminal activity.” Dissidence among the students was a crime; dozens of students were arrested for ideological missteps and sent to labor camps.

Mlynar, who returned to Czechoslovakia and eventually helped lead Alexander Dubcek’s ill-fated Prague Spring reforms, now lives in Vienna. Some biographers have found a pleasant irony in what they see as Mlynar’s influence on the man who would become the most powerful reformer in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. But Kolchanov said that “the influence is overrated. Gorbachev was intellectually curious, he was tolerant, but there were no signs of radicalism. You can’t make those leaps. Remember, Stalinism was something deep inside us. We were only lucky that we were young enough and flexible enough to change later on.” But there was in Gorbachev and some of his friends a tendency toward independence, toward questioning authority, that was surprising, considering the times. Once, in 1952, as a professor teaching “Marxism and Issues of Language” droned on—he was reading straight from the works of Stalin—Gorbachev rose from his chair and said, “Respected professor, we can read for ourselves. What is your interpretation of the reading, and why don’t we discuss it?” Gorbachev was summoned to the dean’s office. But he was not punished. Probably his position in the Komsomol helped him avoid a suspension.

But at the same time, Gorbachev was a leader of the law department’s Komsomol group, and in this position, he took no risks. Two émigrés now living in the West who were in Gorbachev’s class remembered him as a hard-liner in the Komsomol who made speeches scolding the shortcomings and improprieties of fellow Party members. Writing in the émigré journal Possev, Friedrikh Neznansky recalled hearing “the steely voice of the Komsomol secretary of the law department, Gorbachev, demanding expulsion from the Komsomol for the slightest offense, from telling inappropriate political jokes to trying to avoid being sent to a collective farm.” Midway through his five-year course, Gorbachev met Raisa Titorenko, a philosophy student from Siberia. A few of Gorbachev’s friends were taking a ballroom dancing class, and one day Gorbachev and Kolchanov dropped by with the expressed purpose of mocking their buddies. “We were ready to say, ‘You call yourselves real men and look at all this,’ ” Kolchanov said. “But then one of our friends in the class, Volodya Kuzmin, introduced Mikhail Sergeyevich to his dance partner. It was Raisa Maksimovna. I think for Gorbachev it was love at first sight. Just like in the movies. She was just so striking. And, as I think he discovered later on, she was extremely smart.” Raisa, for her part, liked Gorbachev, according to Mlynar, for his “lack of vulgarity.” The marriage may have been the crucial personal event of Gorbachev’s youth, but the signal political event for nearly everyone of his generation came in March 1953: the death of Joseph Stalin. In the years to come, Khrushchev would set free hundreds of thousands of prisoners and begin to tell the truth about Stalin. Although Gorbachev would choose the path of the Party apparatchik, scaling his way up through the hierarchy, flattering Brezhnev and his superiors, he would be one of thousands who would be changed by the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956 when Khrushchev gave his “secret speech” denouncing Stalin. Through a long process of personal and historical change, Gorbachev would recognize the need to transform the country and its relationship to the world. “Really, we have no alternative,” he would say, decades later.

But at the moment Stalin died, there was for Gorbachev and his friends only stunning confusion. “There are a lot of things you could say about Mikhail in the old days that you could say now,” Rudolf Kolchanov said. “He was hardworking, a good listener, tolerant, decent, but he was also much like the rest of us. In fact, he was not the most impressive student in our class by any means. And he believed what he was taught about Stalin. It’s not as if he were always a great reformer and world leader just waiting to happen. Most of us were out all night in the freezing cold trying to see Stalin’s body at the Hall of Columns. When we all got back to the room, in the early hours of the morning, we were sitting on our beds. We tried to talk, but mostly we were just silent, thinking. Some were crying, though I remember that I wasn’t, and neither was Mikhail Sergeyevich. We were so accustomed to life under Stalin. We might find it strange and terrible now, but that was how it was. And then someone spoke the question that everyone had on his mind: ‘What are we going to do now?’ ”