“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 an
d 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.
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