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20 Mikhail Gorbachev, International Traveler
- Penn State University Press
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Foreign travel causes the Russians to see themselves differently. — Another young and upwardly mobile Russian for whom foreign travel was an eyeopener was Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, future member of the Politburo, General Secretary of the Communist Party, and president of the Soviet Union. A man with an inquisitive mind and a high respect for learning, Gorbachev came to those positions with more knowledge about the rest of the world than any top Soviet leader since Lenin. He was also the first university-educated leader to rule Russia since Lenin, and like Lenin, he had studied law, unlike most other Soviet leaders, who had been trained in construction and engineering. Gorbachev, moreover , had a university-educated wife who shared his political life and became his closest confidant and adviser. “My wife and I lived this life together,” he said in an interview.“We thought things over a great deal because we were already people of a new generation.”1 Gorbachev was indeed of a new generation, although his early years were rather typical for a Russian boy from a peasant family in the Soviet Union of the s. He was born in in the village of Privol’noye in the Stavropol region of the North Caucasus, an area of fertile farmland between the lower reaches of two great Russian rivers, the Don and the Dnieper. Settled originally by free Cossack farmers, the region had never known serfdom, and there was plenty of land for everyone. Privol’noye, in fact, means “free” or “spacious.” But was a turbulent year; peasants were being forced off their land and into collective farms. Resistance to collectivization in Stavropol was high, and one of those sent off to a prison camp in Siberia was Gorbachev’s grandfather, Andrei, an event that made a lasting impression on the young boy and determined his later attitude toward Stalinism. Bright and ambitious, Gorbachev completed eight years of basic schooling at the village school in Privol’noye and secondary schooling in a town twenty kilometers away, where he rented a room with other students and returned home once a week to get food for the following week. Summers were spent as a combine operator at a MIKHAIL GORBACHEV, INTERNATIONAL TRAVELER . Mikhail Gorbachev, in interview with Reuters, October , ; JRL, October , . 20 Machine Tractor Station. After serving in the Komsomol, Gorbachev became a candidate member of the Communist Party in , and a full member in . In , he was accepted at the Law Faculty of Moscow State University (MSU), the Soviet Union’s most prestigious university, a rather high achievement for a peasant boy with a provincial education. Also unusual was his choice of law, a profession of low prestige in the Soviet Union. It was at MSU that the country boy had his first exposure, not only to the big city life of Moscow, but also to the West. For five years he lived in the same dormitory with Zdeněk Mlynář, a sophisticated and urbane Czech student who later became a high communist official in his home country, one of the leaders of the reform movement known as Prague Spring, and a signatory of Charter , the basic document of organized dissent in Czechoslovakia. At MSU, the two young men were in the same study group, took the same examinations, were granted the same degrees, became good friends, and even married on the same day. “It is extremely likely,” wrote Russian scientist Zhores A. Medvedev, now living in England , “that after five years of sharing a room with a Czech intellectual, Gorbachev must have been profoundly influenced by Zdeněk Mlynář: The personal knowledge of the culture and attitudes of a traditionally Western nation must have had almost the effect of a prolonged stay abroad in the early s. If Gorbachev had become ‘westernized’ in his appearance, manners, dress, and the image he projects of tolerance and cordial behavior, all the small signs which mark him as different from the usual Komsomol and Party boss, it was probably Mlynář’s doing.”2 Another sign that marked Gorbachev as different from other young communist students at MSU, reports Mlynář, was his pragmatic attitude toward truth. As Mlynář wrote many years later: “From our classes of Marxist philosophy Gorbachev derived his own maxim, a phrase from Hegel—‘The truth is never abstract.’ None of us used it in the precise, Hegelian sense, but he would repeat it often when a teacher or student would express general ideas while ignoring...