Word: mikhail
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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...
...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of leader has risen in the Soviet Union, and that the old rules of dealing with that long-suffering land are suddenly outdated.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...
...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...
...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...
...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...