The Education of Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

"The economy is a mess. We are behind in every area . . . We have forgotten how to work."

At the Central Committee Plenum, Jan. 28, 1987

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.

At the bottom of the hill, Gorbachev asked the farmers, lined up beside their equipment like soldiers on parade, about the mood on the farm. "Good. Businesslike," came the replies. Gorbachev was not satisfied. "I always hear the same answer," he said. "((But)) there are always problems." For example, he asked, was everything available "except for vodka," a teasing reference to his antialcoholism campaign. Well, no, one farmer mumbled. It was the season for making jams and jellies, and sugar was scarce. Gorbachev shot back: Do you know why? Moonshiners are buying up all the sugar to make home brew. "Let's talk straight with one another," said the leader. "Isn't it time to bring the making of moonshine to an end? That sort of people belong back in the times when the dinosaurs lived."

That exchange was typical of the Gorbachev style, a remarkably Western mix of charm and sermonizing. The effect was apparent during the December summit with Ronald Reagan. Alternately jovial and argumentative, combining sharp intelligence with a homey touch and playing to the camera in the most effective way -- by seeming to ignore it -- he came across as a Kremlin version of the Great Communicator. Add an attractive, strong-willed wife, and the picture of an American-style politician is complete.

Also misleading. In most of his views, Gorbachev is a thoroughly Soviet, obdurately Communist figure. When he speaks of "democracy," as he incessantly does, he does not mean anything Thomas Jefferson would have recognized; he promotes freer discussion within the Communist Party only as a substitute for the political opposition he makes clear he will not tolerate. If he voices criticism of Soviet society, it is because that system has in his view strayed from the ideals of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, the founder of the Soviet state and Gorbachev's idol. And though he argues frequently for a new relationship with the U.S., he seems to have an odd conception of America as a Dickensian hell ruled by the military-industrial complex.

^ The 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 take their cue from the boss. A high official mentioned to a group of foreigners recently that he had known the General Secretary as a university student. "What was Gorbachev like in those days?" the man was asked. He paused reflectively, smiled and said, "I don't remember."

Gorbachev's official biography is little more than a bare-bones list of Communist Party offices held, and it lacks some of the most elementary information. For example, it is not known for certain whether he has any siblings. Some Soviets say he has a brother who works in agriculture, but no one seems to know the man's name or age. Reports of a sister cannot be confirmed.

From a variety of sources, however, TIME has pieced together a detailed, though still incomplete, picture of Gorbachev's early days and his rise to command. The story begins in Privolnoye, a farming village (pop. 3,000) in the south of the Russian republic, 124 miles from the city of Stavropol. A one- story brick cottage with a small kitchen, three rooms and a pleasant garden plot still stands there: Gorbachev was born in that house on March 2, 1931.

It was a time of bloodshed and terror. Stalin's drive to force Soviet peasants into collective farms was at its height. Those who resisted were deported or shot. Peasants destroyed animals rather than let them be confiscated by the collectives. That slaughter, along with the Soviet government's oppressive requisitions of grain from the newly formed collective farms, created a man-made famine that was raging when Gorbachev was born. Millions eventually died.

The 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 the brutality shown to a less prosperous group, the so-called middle peasants. A classmate remembers that as a college student after Stalin's death, Gorbachev spoke of a middle-peasant relative who had been arrested and, the classmate assumes, shot.

Not 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 in 1950, when he traveled north to university in Moscow, did he apparently become fully aware of the destruction visited on his homeland. He has said that on that 800-mile train ride, he saw "the ruined Stalingrad, Rostov, Kharkov and Voronezh. And how many such ruined cities there were . . . Everything lay in ruins: hundreds and thousands of cities, towns and villages, factories and mills."

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 interview on Soviet TV, she recalled that at one period during the war Gorbachev could not go to school for several months because he had no shoes. Sergei wrote home urging Maria Panteleyevna to sell anything she could and buy shoes because "Misha must go to school." Maria Panteleyevna, now well into her 70s and a widow (Sergei died in 1976), continues to live in Privolnoye.

Growing up in a farming village, Gorbachev was introduced early to hard work. As a young boy, he probably accompanied his combine-driver father into the fields. At 14 he was driving a combine himself after school and during the summers. It was a hot and sweaty job in that part of the Soviet Union, where summer temperatures reach well into the 90s, and the combines had no cabins. After a few minutes the driver would be surrounded by a cloud of grain chaff and dust that made breathing difficult. In winter it was so cold that Gorbachev had to wrap himself in straw to keep from freezing. He stood it well enough to be awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labor in 1949, a rare honor for an 18-year-old. The award, his impeccable political credentials -- peasant background, father and grandfather Communist Party members -- and the silver medal he received upon graduation from high school as second in his class all helped him win a place at Moscow State University in the fall of 1950.

Gorbachev was already showing wide-ranging intellectual curiosity. "I cannot even say for which subjects I felt a special interest in school," he told an Italian interviewer much later. "At the outset I wanted to enter the physics faculty ((of Moscow State University)). I liked mathematics a lot, but I also liked history and literature. To this day I can recite by heart poetry that I learned at school." He lacked the entrance requirements to pursue science courses, so he decided to study law.

The choice was unconventional. Law in those Stalinist days had no prestige; it was even despised by many Soviets. The task of a lawyer was to find rationalizations for the state to crush its opponents. Nonetheless, Gorbachev's classes did expose him to a wider range of ideas than he would have encountered pursuing a science curriculum. Like all other Soviet students, Gorbachev was drilled in Marxism-Leninism, and learned minute details about the life of Stalin. But as a law student he took classes in the history of political ideas and studied the works of Thomas Aquinas, Hobbes, Locke and Machiavelli. Gorbachev also studied Latin. Several classes were taught by professors who had somehow managed to survive from prerevolutionary days.

When he began his studies, the adulation of Stalin, "the greatest genius of all times and peoples," was at its height, and the earnest young provincial was not immune to it. "He, like everyone else at the time, was a Stalinist," says Zdenek Mlynar, a Czech who studied law at Moscow State University and later became a top party official in his homeland. But Gorbachev displayed a streak of hardheaded realism about Soviet life. He and Mlynar once watched a propaganda movie, Cossacks of the Kuban, picturing happy peasants at tables groaning with food. "It's not like that at all," grumbled Gorbachev, who remembered hunger in his home region. Mlynar adds that "when we were studying collective-farm law, Gorbachev explained to me how insignificant collective- farm legislation was in day-to-day life and how important, on the other hand, was brute force, which alone secured working discipline on the collective farms."

Fridrikh Neznansky, another fellow law student and now a Soviet emigre, recalls that Gorbachev even then displayed a veneration for Lenin going well beyond what was demanded of Soviet students. He was especially impressed, Neznansky says, by Lenin's doctrine of "one step forward, two steps back" -- in other words, the ability to maneuver and to retreat if necessary while pursuing a goal. Tactical flexibility has been a hallmark of Gorbachev's career ever since. "In politics and ideology, we are seeking to revive the spirit of Leninism," Gorbachev writes in his recently published book, Perestroika. "Many decades of being mesmerized by dogma, by a rule-book approach, have had their effect. Today we want to introduce a genuinely creative spirit into our theoretical work." The first faint glimmerings of glasnost might also be discerned in Gorbachev's law-school attitudes. Mlynar remembers that students were taught to regard anyone who dissented from the Stalinist line as a criminal. Gorbachev, however, remarked to his Czech classmate: "But Lenin did not order the arrest of Martov ((leader of the Mensheviks, a socialist splinter group)). He allowed him to leave the country."

Outside class, students led a grim existence. Gorbachev spent the first three of his student years in the shabby Stromynka student hostel, an 18th century former barracks that housed 10,000 young people packed eight or more to a room. There was a kitchen and a washroom on each floor, but no proper bathing facilities. Gorbachev and his roommates would head to a public bathhouse twice a month. They stored their personal belongings in suitcases under the beds. Many of the youths could not even afford tea. Instead, they drank "student tea," a concoction of hot water and sugar. The favorite diversion was foreign movies, most of them captured by the Red Army from German forces and shown in the "culture club" on the main floor. Johnny Weissmuller's Tarzan movies were most popular. After one such epic show, the Stromynka hostel would resound with jungle whoops by the students.

In this maelstrom, Gorbachev somehow found time and privacy for romance. Male and female students lived on the same floors, though they had separate sleeping and bathroom facilities. Gorbachev and his roommates drew up a complicated schedule guaranteeing each of them one hour alone in the room every week to entertain a female guest. On the hall bulletin board, the periods of privacy were discreetly designated "cleaning hours."

One of the 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 to her room. The couple did not live together until several months later, when they obtained married-student accommodations in the newly completed 34-story main building of Moscow State University.

Though Gorbachev was trained as a lawyer, he has never practiced; his main interest from his earliest days at Moscow State University was politics. Even before leaving Privolnoye, he had joined the Komsomol, the youth league that people ages 14 to 28 pass through in preparation for joining the Communist Party. Armed with a glowing recommendation from the Stavropol committee, he became a Komsomol organizer at the Moscow State University law school in 1952 and simultaneously, at 21, a member of the party proper. He was assigned to a working-class area of Moscow for propaganda activity and the handling of constituents' complaints, while continuing his Komsomol work at the university.

Those who knew Gorbachev as a young party activist agree that he was a true believer among cynical careerists. He had some reservations about particular policies, but when he spouted the Stalinist line of the moment, he did so with evident conviction. Lev Yudovich, who graduated two years ahead of Gorbachev, recalls having the young ideologue pointed out to him as someone to fear. There was reason to be wary of him: Neznansky asserts that when Gorbachev discovered that some fellow students had parents who were in political disgrace, he called for their expulsion from the Komsomol and perhaps from the university as well. Michel Tatu, a prominent French Kremlinologist and author of a forthcoming biography of Gorbachev, is convinced that he joined in the vicious anti-Semitic rhetoric of Stalin's last purge, launched just before the dictator's death in early 1953. Mlynar does not deny that, but he insists that Gorbachev steered clear of any individual persecutions.

By 1955, the year of Gorbachev's graduation, the Stalinist ice had broken in the Soviet Union. Nikita Khrushchev had taken over and was winding down the terror. Ghostly figures began drifting back into Moscow from the labor camps. But at the start of this period of ferment and change, Gorbachev removed himself and Raisa from the relative sophistication of Moscow and returned to the Stavropol area, where he was to stay for the next 23 years. According to Neznansky, the young graduate tried for a position with the Moscow Komsomol apparatus but lost out to a classmate and had little choice but to return to the provinces if he wanted to continue a career in party politics. It may be too that Gorbachev felt an obligation to the Stavropol Krai (territory) authorities, who had apparently paid part of his university expenses, or that he was simply homesick.

In any event, the Stavropol period remains the most obscure of Gorbachev's life. It is known that he rose fast, from a minor job in the local Komsomol to its first secretary after less than a year, then through a variety of Komsomol and, later, party jobs. By 1962, when he was only 31, he was choosing party members for promotion throughout Stavropol Krai. Finally in 1970, at the age of 39, he became first secretary of the territory, a job equivalent to governor of an area roughly the size of South Carolina, with about 2.4 million people. Along the way, he became a specialist in farming, the main activity of the area. He took correspondence courses from Stavropol Agricultural Institute, and in 1967 added a degree in agriculture to his Moscow law degree. Soviet emigres and Stavropol residents provide some intriguing glimpses of Gorbachev on his way up the party apparat.

- Gorbachev showed an avid interest in the press. Vladimir Maximov, a writer now living in Paris who worked for a Stavropol Komsomol newspaper in the 1950s, recalls that the young official often visited the paper's offices for a chat. "He would sit down with us in a casual manner," says Maximov. "We would uncork a bottle of wine ((for all his antialcoholism campaigning, Gorbachev still enjoys an occasional drink)) and usually talk politics. Khrushchev's report on the crimes of the Stalinist era had recently appeared. The entire country was still reeling from shock." Maximov and others of Gorbachev's generation, however, remember the late 1950s as an exciting time. Khrushchev's secret speech denouncing Stalin at the 20th Communist Party Congress in 1956 briefly opened the way to a much freer atmosphere. It was a false dawn. Repression resumed a few years later. To this day, however, educated Soviets of Gorbachev's generation, whose political attitudes were formed then and who are now moving into positions of power, sometimes refer to themselves as "children of the 20th Congress."

Gorbachev's interest in the press continued throughout the Stavropol period. As party boss of the area, he often met with regional journalists for talks similar to those he now holds in Moscow with the national press. Unlike other party officials, he would stress that it was not enough for the journalists to write articles that were ideologically correct; they also had to be interesting. "Is anyone reading what you write?" he would ask.

Gorbachev remained open and accessible to his constituents. He usually set out on foot for his job each morning. Stavropolitans quickly learned that they could avoid having to make a formal appointment at Gorbachev's office on Lenin Square by buttonholing him on his walk up Dzerzhinsky Street and discussing their problems then. He also began in Stavropol Krai the walkabouts that were later to cause a national sensation when he continued the practice as General Secretary. On a visit to a village in the Izobilnynsky district, he heard from an indignant mother of six children how the manager of a state store had treated her rudely. The storekeeper was fired. Gorbachev showed some independence from Moscow when he was Stavropol party boss. Turned down for state financing of a permanent circus building, he solicited funds from local organizations and institutions and got the building put up anyway.

The 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.

Was Gorbachev getting restless with provincial posts? Perhaps. Mlynar, who was rising toward the top levels of the Czech Communist Party, visited his old classmate in 1967 and recalls that Gorbachev complained about excessive interference by Moscow in local affairs. Mlynar described the sweeping reforms that Alexander Dubcek was then beginning in Czechoslovakia. He remembers Gorbachev saying, with a sigh, "Perhaps there are possibilities in Czechoslovakia because conditions are different." The Czech reforms, however, were crushed by Soviet tanks the following year, and Mlynar went into exile; he now lives in Austria. The two old friends talked and drank through that afternoon and deep into the night. When they finally returned to Gorbachev's apartment, much the worse for wear, Raisa was furious.

Just how Gorbachev rose out of provincial obscurity is still somewhat mysterious. As late as 1978, few outside Stavropol Krai had ever heard of him. The best answer seems to be that he attracted a number of powerful patrons. The first was Fyodor Kulakov, who as party boss in Stavropol first spotted Gorbachev as having great promise. After Kulakov became Agriculture Secretary for the entire Soviet Union, Gorbachev eventually succeeded him in Stavropol -- and Kulakov apparently made sure his protege became known in Moscow. In 1977 the "Ipatovsky method," a new technique of harvesting grain quickly by using flying squads of combines, was judged a smashing success. The idea was probably Kulakov's, but it was first tried in the district of Ipatovsky, in Stavropol Krai, under Gorbachev's supervision. The young regional politician was accorded the honor of an interview on the front page of Pravda, his first taste of national publicity.

Geography gave Gorbachev a mighty assist too. Christian Schmidt-Hauer, a West German journalist and biographer, observes that if Gorbachev had been party chief in, say, Murmansk in the far north, he would never have become General Secretary. But in Stavropol Krai, he was on hand to welcome top Moscow officials who came to the local spas at Mineralnye Vody and Kislovodsk for vacations and medical treatment. They found their host unusual in several respects. Says Soviet Historian Roy Medvedev: "A regional party first secretary who was intelligent and congenial would have been considered untypical. If Gorbachev had yelled, sworn, been a heavy drinker or a high liver with a rest house outside of town where officials could be entertained by pretty waitresses, that would have been considered normal behavior."

Gorbachev was not like that at all. He was a quiet and pleasant host with a reputation throughout the district for incorruptibility. Writer Maximov relates a story about a mutual friend, a poet, who asked Gorbachev as a young Komsomol official to help him buy a Volga sedan. Gorbachev obligingly used his influence to speed delivery. The poet promptly sold the car on the black market and returned to ask Gorbachev for help in buying another. Says Maximov: "Gorbachev did not usually lose his temper, but on that occasion he started shouting and threw the poet out of his office, ordering him never to show his face there again."

The 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 for a brief time. In one of the more remarkable moments in Soviet history, four men who were all to serve as General Secretary found themselves on the same narrow station platform: Brezhnev; Andropov, who had come over from the nearby spa and in 1982 would succeed Brezhnev; Konstantin Chernenko, then Brezhnev's chief aide and in 1984 Andropov's successor; and Gorbachev, who would take over from Chernenko as General Secretary the following year. Less than a month after that gathering, Gorbachev was plucked out of Stavropol to become, at 47, a member of the national hierarchy, ranking 20th among all Soviet leaders.

How he leaped from there to No. 1 in only seven more years is another question still not fully answered. Certainly his rise was not attributable to % any glittering success in agriculture. Quite the opposite: the grain harvest fell from a record 230 million tons in 1978, when Gorbachev was taking over the agriculture portfolio, to a calamitous total of perhaps only 155 million tons in 1981. Bad weather played a role. So did Brezhnev, who announced a grandiose reorganization of agriculture that seemed to create more problems than it solved. Still, it is remarkable that Gorbachev managed not only to escape blame but to advance his career amid the farming fiasco. Only a year after returning to Moscow, he became a candidate member of the Politburo. The following year, at 49, he was made a full member. Gorbachev was eight years younger than the next youngest Politburo member and 21 years younger than the average age of his colleagues.

One reason Gorbachev's agriculture record was not held against him was simply that the Kremlin leadership found itself in desperate need of new blood. Brezhnev's health was faltering, and his 18-year regime was sinking into a twilight of stagnation and corruption. When Brezhnev died in 1982 and Andropov came into office with plans for reform, he immediately began grooming Gorbachev to become a key lieutenant in his clean-up campaign.

Gorbachev was already preparing himself for national leadership. While still in charge of farming, he gathered Soviet academic experts for a series of seminars held sometimes in the Central Committee offices, sometimes in a dacha outside Moscow. The sessions started with problems of agriculture but quickly developed into freewheeling discussions of what was wrong with the economy in general and how it might be fixed. Among the participants were Economist Abel Aganbegyan, who had been urging decentralization and a wider role for market incentives since the mid-1960s, and Tatyana Zaslavskaya, a leading sociologist. Zaslavskaya recalls one encounter with Gorbachev: "I sat next to him. It is incredible what power and drive emanate from him. One feels as if it were a strong field of energy. His vitality is extraordinary, and yet, although you feel this tension, he is a good listener and waits for you to finish."

The rising Kremlin star got a firsthand look at how far the Soviet economy had fallen behind the West's. When Gorbachev joined the national hierarchy, he was already well traveled by comparison with such other Soviet leaders as Andropov, who never set foot outside the Communist world, and Suslov, who reportedly once told a visa applicant that he saw no reason why anyone would want to journey beyond the U.S.S.R.

As a Politburo member, Gorbachev in 1983 headed a Soviet agricultural delegation on a visit to Canada and spent ten days poking around farms, processing plants and supermarkets. At one cattle ranch, he asked to see "some of the workers." The rancher replied that there were none; he ran the spread of several hundred acres with only his family and a handful of day laborers. A Canadian host who speaks Russian heard Gorbachev mutter under his breath, "We are not going to see this ((in the Soviet Union)) for another 50 years." Eugene Whelan, then Minister of Agriculture and Gorbachev's official host, was surprised on another occasion to hear the Soviet leader comment about the invasion of Afghanistan: "It was a mistake." (He was later to call Afghanistan a "bleeding wound," but in public he still justifies the invasion.) In the same year, however, Gorbachev served on a Politburo crisis- management subgroup that sought to justify the Soviet downing of a Korean Air Lines passenger jet by asserting that the plane had been on a spying mission for the U.S.

By the time a fatal kidney ailment cut short Andropov's tenure in early 1984, Gorbachev was already a candidate to succeed his former mentor. At Andropov's funeral, Gorbachev made a telling gesture of his closeness to the late General Secretary: he was the only Politburo member publicly to console Andropov's bereaved widow Tatyana. But the Old Guard made a final stand, choosing Chernenko instead. Gorbachev went along, and even agreed to make the nominating speech. He probably knew his turn would come soon enough. Ailing and 72, Chernenko was not going to last long. In fact, through much of his year in power Chernenko was so ill that Gorbachev, his principal deputy, in effect ran the country.

Even so, he had opposition. Grigori Romanov, the hard-line former Leningrad party boss who was once thought to be Gorbachev's chief rival, had apparently given up on winning the top job for himself. But at the Politburo session called immediately after Chernenko's death, Romanov reportedly tried a stop- Gorbachev maneuver, nominating Moscow Party Boss Viktor Grishin for General Secretary. By some accounts, however, KGB Chief Viktor Chebrikov hinted that his agency had compiled dossiers on corruption in the Moscow party apparatus that could be highly embarrassing to Grishin. (Chebrikov was then a candidate member of the Politburo; he has since moved up to full membership.) Andrei Gromyko, then Foreign Minister, carried the day with a nominating speech for Gorbachev during which he coined the now celebrated remark, "This man has a nice smile, but he has iron teeth." Gromyko's speech was surprising in two respects: it appears to have been improvised, and it contained none of the lengthy recitation of the hero's accomplishments traditional on such occasions. Gromyko appeared to be saying: this man has not really done all that much yet, but he is still the best we have.

Gorbachev had been in power only a month when he roamed around the industrial Proletarsky district of Moscow, visiting supermarkets, chatting with workers at the Likhachyov truck factory, discussing computer training with teachers at School No. 514 and nurses' pay with the staff of City Hospital No. 53. He even dropped into a young couple's apartment for tea. That was the first of the walkabouts that have taken him, sometimes accompanied by Raisa, from Murmansk in the north to Kamchatka on the shores of the Pacific. On several of his tours he has displayed an easy informality and an almost impish distaste for ceremonial oratory. Entering the hall of the Starnikovsky Farm near Moscow to talk to livestock breeders last summer, he veered away from the row of seats on the tribunal and perched on the edge of the table so that he could be closer to the crowd. In October, at the Baltic Shipyards in Leningrad, a spokesman for the workers began a monotone welcoming speech expressing a wish that perestroika would develop even faster. Gorbachev interrupted with playful cries of "Davai! Davai!" (Let's go to it!), drawing a big laugh from the crowd.

Gorbachev has an apartment in central Moscow, but lives most of the time in a closed and guarded area of single-family mansions on the western outskirts of the city. From there he is driven downtown daily at 9 a.m. in a four-ZIL motorcade: one car for himself; two for aides and bodyguards, and a heavily curtained vehicle bristling with antennas that is assumed to carry the coding equipment for launching nuclear weapons. His main office is on the fifth floor of the Central Committee headquarters, a quarter of a mile from the Kremlin; he also maintains an office in a building just behind the Lenin Mausoleum and the Kremlin wall, but he uses it mostly to receive visitors. He usually returns home at about 6 p.m. in another motorcade. Extra traffic police are stationed along Kutuzovsky Prospekt to clear the central lanes for the four limousines. He stays downtown late only when there is some special ceremonial function or when, as often happens, the regular Thursday Politburo meeting runs into the evening.

While Gorbachev's working schedule does not seem to be overly taxing, he recently answered an Italian interviewer's question as to how he spends his free time by saying simply, "I have none." He is, however, an avid theatergoer. In Stavropol he and Raisa attended not only every play that opened but also many dress rehearsals. In Moscow, while preparing for the Washington summit, they found time to take in The Peace of Brest, a historical drama about Lenin's early years in power that opened Nov. 30.

The Gorbachevs have a daughter Irina, 28, who is a physician and married to another doctor, and two known grandchildren. The extent to which the Gorbachevs guard their family privacy can be gauged by some of the things that are not known for sure: Irina's married name (only the first name of her husband, Anatoli, has been disclosed); the granddaughter's name (it has been reported as both Oksana and Xenia); her age (probably seven); and the sex and name of a second grandchild (Gorbachev proudly told former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, who visited Moscow last summer, that one had just been born, but would disclose no more than that).

Gorbachev retains his ties to Privolnoye, going to see his mother there at least once a year. On one trip to Stavropol in 1982, Gorbachev, by then a member of the Politburo, talked with aged collective farmers, who complained about their low pensions of 36 rubles ($49.30) a month. "I know my mother also receives 36 rubles, but she keeps chickens and a cow; why don't you?" Gorbachev replied. (Nonetheless, back in Moscow, he saw to it that pensions were increased.) Maria Panteleyevna regularly attends Russian Orthodox Church services, and there are reports that she had Gorbachev baptized. Gorbachev has said that his grandparents kept icons in their home, hiding them behind pictures of Lenin and Stalin, and once took him to church. He added, though, that he had no desire to go back. Officially, at least, he is an atheist whose occasional references to God are probably no more than an unconscious repetition of phrases common in the rural Russia of his boyhood.

As a law student, Gorbachev received some practical training in oratory. That, plus a natural flair for speaking, has produced a man who is considered the finest orator of any Soviet leader since Lenin (who was also trained as a lawyer). Gorbachev's phraseology is not remarkable, or at least does not read well in translation. The English version of Perestroika, published in the U.S. just before the December summit, is blandly general. But in a Gorbachev speech, as TV viewers around the world have discovered, phrases that seem flat on the printed page suddenly come to life.

Russian is a language spoken with the hands, the eyebrows, an occasional shake of the head from side to side or a shrug of the shoulders. Gorbachev has mastered those gestures, and more. He may slice the air with a modified karate chop or spin his hands one over the other like a pinwheel, then extend them palms up in a gesture of vulnerability, only to clench them into fists a moment later. All the time his intense eyes lock onto a listener's. The eyes, he once told an audience in Prague, never lie. Much of his animation comes through even in translation. In a TV interview, for example, he may pause reflectively after a question, start an answer with a few slow phrases, then burst into a torrent of words that an interpreter can barely keep up with.

Such skills have served Gorbachev well in his 33 months in office. Though he grumbles about opposition to his policies from a bureaucracy that "does not want change and does not want to lose some rights associated with privileges," he has consolidated his power rapidly. He has thoroughly purged the ranks of the Politburo, the Central Committee and government ministries of leaders judged to be incompetent or dragging their feet on reform. More than half of all government ministers and 44% of party Central Committee members have been replaced since he took over.

Gorbachev's idea of glasnost stops well short of Western-style artistic and journalistic freedom. Nonetheless, the policy has gone further than anyone would have predicted even a few years ago, winning Gorbachev the enthusiastic approval of intellectuals. Says Vitali Korotich, editor of Ogonyok, an illustrated weekly that has published hard-hitting articles about social problems as well as anthologies of long-suppressed poetry: "This is an evening of dancing in a society that has never danced."

Perestroika, however, is still more platitude than policy. Gorbachev confessed in June that "despite tremendous efforts, the restructuring drive has in actual fact not reached many localities." In particular, agricultural reforms designed to give farmers more incentive, which Gorbachev began experimenting with back in Stavropol and for which he supposedly won Politburo approval as long ago as 1983, have yet to be put into effect nationwide. Meanwhile, the economy continues to fall behind those of the West. As recently as 1975, the Soviet economy was about 58% as large as its U.S. counterpart. But by 1984 that figure had fallen to 54%, and the gap is probably still growing. With his usual hard-boiled realism, Gorbachev told the Central Committee shortly before becoming General Secretary, "We cannot remain a major power in world affairs unless we put our domestic house in order."

At best, it will take years before Gorbachev's program of freeing industry from Moscow's stifling central control results in any significant increase in the quantity and quality of goods reaching Soviet consumers. Gorbachev complains that "Soviet rockets can find Halley's comet and fly to Venus with amazing accuracy, but . . . many household appliances are of poor quality." The Soviet leader may be hard put to maintain the popular support he is counting on to overcome bureaucratic lethargy and opposition. Gauging public opinion in the U.S.S.R. is a highly uncertain art, but letters to the Soviet press often approve the idea of perestroika while simultaneously complaining that the writers have not seen much of it yet. Some polls disclose considerable grumbling that perestroika has so far meant only harder work for little measurable reward. Consumers may soon have to pay more for some of the necessities of life if Gorbachev follows through on his plan to trim or eliminate many state subsidies. The Kremlin boss rightly complains that the subsidies on bread, for example, make it so cheap that children sometimes use loaves as footballs. But a higher price for bread, while it might be fully justified by production costs, is likely to cause strong discontent.

Gorbachev acknowledges that his antialcohol campaign is highly unpopular. He once told a group of writers that he was aware of "threats" as well as grumbling from the long lines of people queueing up to buy scarce and expensive vodka. One gag has a man at the end of one of the liquor-store lines announcing that he is so furious he is going over to the Kremlin to shoot Gorbachev. He returns in a few minutes, however, and resumes his place in the queue. "Well, did you do it?" asks a comrade. "You must be joking," the would-be assassin replies. "The line over there is even longer."

) In foreign policy too, Gorbachev's approach is a mixture of much touted "new thinking" and dismayingly old reflexes. Despite his flexibility in the realm of superpower relations, he maintains some strange attitudes about the U.S. By his own account, he began reading American history as a law student, and he has kept himself remarkably well informed. In recent interviews he has referred offhandedly to matters, such as Ronald Reagan's "economic bill of rights," that are not widely known even to U.S. citizens.

Nonetheless, he seems to have a streak of what can only be described as anti-Americanism. Perhaps the first American to have an extended conversation with him was John Chrystal, chairman of Bankers Trust of Des Moines and a frequent traveler to the Soviet Union, who called on Gorbachev in 1981. Says Chrystal: "He does believe, never having been here, that the U.S. has abject poverty and quite a lot of it. My impression is that he thinks there are whole towns that are just sort of destitute." Eugene Whelan, the former Canadian Agriculture Minister who was later Gorbachev's host in North America, also visited him in 1981 and got into an argument about armaments. Says Whelan: "He was going on about how the U.S. was the aggressor, how it was making weapons. He said the U.S. was returning to the conditions of the 1950s." When Whelan remonstrated that in the American view it was the Soviet Union that had piled up weapons far beyond any legitimate defense needs, Gorbachev brusquely responded, "That is erroneous."

At Chernenko's funeral in 1985, Gorbachev encountered Armand Hammer, the American businessman who has been trading with the Soviets since Lenin's day, and denounced Ronald Reagan to him as a man who wanted war. He mellowed after meeting the U.S. President later that year at their first summit in Geneva, and today speaks respectfully of Reagan. Still, when Hammer called at the Kremlin in 1986, Gorbachev told him, "Your President couldn't make peace if he wanted to. He's a prisoner of the military-industrial complex," which in Gorbachev's mind seems to be both all powerful and moved by an implacable hostility to the Soviets. Hammer tried to dissuade him but got nowhere, largely, he suspects, because Gorbachev had been put in a defensive mood by U.S. and other foreign criticism of his handling of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear-plant accident. Says Hammer: "Gorbachev's weakness is that he has a temper, and that he flares up, and that he has a lot of pride, of course, and self-confidence." The Soviet leader has generally managed to keep his temper under control in public. Indeed, friends and opponents agree that he is almost invariably polite. But he does blow up now and then -- especially, as foreign TV viewers have discovered, when he is questioned sharply about the Soviet Union's human-rights record.

Gorbachev, however, need not admire Americans in order to live peaceably with them. Nor is it necessary for the U.S. to enroll in a Gorbachev personality cult in order to recognize the Soviet leader as being a figure of hope, for all his contradictions. His upbringing, schooling and rise to power have produced a man of immense incongruities, stubborn and flexible, a faithful ideologue and a radical experimenter.

He could be the most dangerous adversary the U.S. and its allies have faced in decades -- or the most constructive. Molded by famine and war, 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.

"Like mountain climbers on one rope, the world's nations can either climb together to the summit or fall together into the abyss."

On a visit to Prague, April 10, 1987

With reporting by David Aikman/Washington, James O. Jackson/Moscow and John Kohan/Stavropol