Word: mikhail
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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 at 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...
...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. They 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 wedding night. Gorbachev's roommates had arranged to stay away. The following day, however, they drifted back, and Raisa returned...
...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...
...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...
...Mikhail and Raisa Gorbachev were dining with Margaret and Denis Thatcher during their 1984 visit to Britain, and the talk got around to the working class. In his country, the Soviet leader-to-be asserted, "we are all working class...