Lenin's Tomb

by David Remnick

  At the very moment when Gorbachev was born in March 1931, southern Russia and Ukraine were living through the collectivization campaign and the starvation that went along with it. According to Western studies, more than thirty thousand people in the Stavropol region died during the terror-famine of 1931–32. Despite the horror of those years, Gorbachev, like so many “reform Communists,” believed in the idea of collective farms, but abhorred what Bukharin called the “Genghis Khan” methods of Stalin.

  Without plunging into the puddle of psychohistory, one might fairly say that Gorbachev’s early sense of himself as a success was tied to the collective farm. Working with his father and the family of fellow farmworker Aleksandr Yakovenko, Gorbachev spent his teenage summers on a rickety S-80 combine harvesting grain. It was hard and filthy work, usually under a broiling southern sun. To cool off, the two boys, Gorbachev and Yakovenko, stripped and sat in barrels of river water. The Gorbachev-Yakovenko team was a local success, so much so that they earned a banner headline in the June 20, 1948, edition of the Road of Ilyich, the local newspaper: “Comrade Gorbachev Is Ready to Harvest.”

  The next year, while Gorbachev was in high school, the team won a coveted honor, the Medal of the Red Banner. Such an honor was the first step toward a life in the Party. Many years later, when he was the regional Party leader in Stavropol, Gorbachev would visit the farms in the region and stun his traveling party when old farming friends like the shepherd Vasily Rudenko would greet him with a bear hug and “Hey, Misha! Have you eaten?” With that, they would march into Rudenko’s hut for a plate of jellied innards and a bowl of borshch.

  After the brief and unnerving driving tour of Privolnoye, we headed for the town of Krasnogvardeiskoye, or “Red Guard.” Gorbachev knew this stretch of road well. Four decades before, he woke early in his parents’ house, a two-room hut made of mud, manure, and straw with pigs and chickens and an outhouse in the yard. The harvest was over. The village schools were opening. Gorbachev tucked a package of home-grown food under his arm, met up with his friend Dmitri Markov, and began the walk to Krasnogvardeiskoye’s High School No. 1. Gorbachev rented a bed in the house of an old retired couple there. Weekends he returned home to Privolnoye to work in the fields.

  The two-story brick high school fast became the center of Gorbachev’s universe. He was the classic small-town overachiever, a class-president type who scored high marks, starred in the school plays, and won the heart of the best-looking girl in the school. For half a day, I buzzed around the town, talking to teachers, old friends, people on the street. There was, of course, something preposterous about the entire mission, something straight out of the old television series This Is Your Life. Yekaterina Chaika, Gorbachev’s old chemistry teacher, was one of several people to deliver twinkling remembrances and boilerplate as if on cue. “He is a man of his time,” she said, “and there are countless factors of history that come into play. But if you want to understand him better as a man, it doesn’t hurt to know where he came from. Like anyone, he has roots. And those roots are right here.” Others who probably did not know him at all conjured visions of the ideal. “You know,” one man told me, “I don’t think Mikhail Sergeyevich even had that birthmark on his head when he was here.”

  But there were others in town who had something to show me. The high school principal was Oleg Sredni, a man at least fifteen years younger than Gorbachev. He seemed unfazed by the prospect of helping an uninvited foreigner find out more about the general secretary of the Communist Party.

  “You want to see Mikhail Sergeyevich’s grades?” he said. “I think we have them here in the safe.”

  Plump and graceful, Sredni darted across his office to the safe and brought out a musty, Dickensian ledger. He opened to 1950, the year of Gorbachev’s graduation, and there, in a formal hand and cloudy ink, was “Gorbachev, Mikhail Sergeyevich” and a line of numbers. On a grade scale with 5 being the highest to 1 the lowest, Gorbachev had a nearly uninterrupted row of 5s: algebra, Russian literature, trigonometry, history of the Soviet Union, the Soviet Constitution, astronomy, and so on. The one blemish was a 4 in German. “Apparently his class in Privolnoye refused to take German after the war, so he was a bit behind when he got here,” Sredni said in a tone of churchly reverence. “That is why he got the silver medal here, not the gold.”

  Except for the portrait of Gorbachev on Sredni’s office wall, the school had not paid much attention to honoring their native son. In the school’s hall of fame, Gorbachev was listed as just one medal winner among many, a future general secretary next to Gennadi Fateyev, the class poet. I had been to high schools in the United States where third-rate quarterbacks have been honored more grandly. Sredni had made sure there would be no personality cult in the halls of his school.

  “In our day there were lots of pictures of Stalin, of course. I remember one especially, a portrait of Stalin and Mao called The Great Friendship,” said Yuri Serikov, one of Gorbachev’s classmates and now a history teacher at the school. “It was absurd, but what did we know?”

  Gorbachev was a Soviet Best Boy, with conventional ambitions and ideas. He was the leader of the school’s Komsomol organization and became a candidate for membership in the Communist Party when he was only eighteen. He was no high school rebel. “We were told that Stalin was doing everything perfectly, and we believed it all,” Yuri Serikov said. “That was our level of understanding, and Mikhail Sergeyevich was no exception. None of us ever thought twice about it.”

  After interviewing fifteen or twenty people in town, the inevitable happened: the KGB caught up with me. Sredni, the school principal, took a phone call while I was in his office. “Da,” he said grimly. And da three or four times more, all with the same dead tone of obedience. He hung up the receiver and, lifting his eyes to me, said, “I’m afraid I can’t talk with you anymore. Please wait here.”

  Someone had obviously called the authorities, and I was soon summoned to the office of the deputy Communist Party chief, the head chief being out of town on business. The deputy chief had a caveman brow and never smiled. When I told him that I had heard no objections from the Foreign Ministry in Moscow to my coming to the countryside, the deputy chief did not betray the slightest emotion.

  “You will get in your car, and proceed directly to Stavropol,” he said.

  “What about Privolnoye?” I said. “I told the foreign ministry I’d go there, too.”

  “As you know, there is a quarantine.”

  “What quarantine?”

  “You know very well. You were told.”

  “And how do you know that?”

  The deputy chief blinked once, slowly, to indicate annoyance. I was not to be childish, he seemed to say. He had no time. He had an entire town to run into the ground before the year was out.

  Before leaving Krasnogvardeiskoye, I had asked a dozen people if Gorbachev had a girlfriend when he was in school. Everyone remembered the same name: Yuliya Karagodina. “Very pretty, if I remember.” “Played the Snowgirl in the play with Mikhail Sergeyevich.” When I asked one local Communist Party official if she had Karagodina’s number, she smiled girlishly, conspiratorily, and gave it to me.

  Yuliya Karagodina, it turned out, had long ago moved to Moscow, where she was divorced, living with her mother, and teaching at a chemistry institute. When I called and asked to see her, Yuliya, as she asked me to call her, was nervous, but quickly agreed. “Make sure you use ‘Karagodina,’ my maiden name, and don’t tell any other reporters my number. I knew this would happen sooner or later. I’ll tell you everything and that’ll be it.”

  A few days later, we met in a basement laboratory at her institute. Yuliya was no longer beautiful, not even a match for the woman she faintly regarded as the victor, Raisa Maksimovna. She was middle-aged, matronly, and sweet.

  “Was it love?” I said.

  “It was love, yes it was, for both of us,” she said. “I was attracted to him, he was magnetic. But I’d be upset if you thought that our relation
ship was like those that young people have now. It just wasn’t that way. We were close friends, and we cared for each other and helped each other. It was—what would you say?—a specific kind of friendship, not just a Komsomol thing. Young love, you might call it. We met for the first time in the September he arrived at school, and after a few months we grew closer. He once told me that he had liked a blond girl named Talia in Privolnoye, but that was more a child’s affection.

  “You know, it’s funny, but whenever I watch him now on television leading the Supreme Soviet, I think of Misha in school, playing the Grand Prince in Lermontov’s Masquerade or heading the morning gym class, shouting into a big megaphone: ‘Ready, class! Hup, two, three, four! Hup, two, three, four!’ He was fearless for someone that age. I remember him correcting teachers in history class, and once he was so angry at one teacher he said, ‘Do you want to keep your teaching certificate?’ He was the sort who felt he was right and could prove it to anyone, be it in the principal’s office or at a Komsomol meeting.”

  Yuliya said she had grown up in a village much like Privolnoye a few miles down the road. Her mother was a widowed schoolteacher, and so their circumstances were more modest than Gorbachev’s. Yuliya put her briefcase on the table and took out a huge sheaf of old photographs. In pictures of the young drama costars, Gorbachev was dark and regal in his homemade costume and fake mustache. Karagodina was wide-eyed, delicate, a bit faraway. She looked like Lillian Gish in Broken Blossoms.

  As Yuliya leafed through the pictures, slowly, like a child dealing cards, she said, “Once we were rehearsing Ostrovsky’s play The Snowgirl. And there is a point when the Snowgirl—that was me—says, ‘Dear Czar, ask me a hundred times if I love him, and I will answer a hundred times that I do.’ I said those lines in open rehearsal, with the principal sitting right there in the audience. Suddenly, Gorbachev leaned over and whispered in my ear, ‘Is it true?’ My God! I was shaken. I could hardly go on with my monologue. Everyone was asking what had happened, and there was Gorbachev off to the side, smiling. Sometimes we spoke rather roughly to each other, but I was so dumbfounded, I couldn’t answer.

  “The truth is, he was a very good actor. There was a time when he even talked with me, and his friends Boris Gladskoi and Gennadi Donskoi, about trying for a theatrical institute. But I think he really always wanted to be a lawyer.

  “We never really spoke about the future, except that we would go to Moscow and study there together. I’ll tell you the truth. If we had been well dressed, well fed, and had everything like this generation, then maybe we would have talked about such things. But they were hard times, and we concentrated on our studies.…

  “I was very proud and poor. Gorbachev was better off. He was better dressed. During the war, my family had been evacuated from Krasnodar to the Stavropol region. Gorbachev’s family were living in their own house on their own soil. They always had enough to eat. He once invited me to come meet his parents in Privolnoye. I said that I had been brought up in such a way that I could not do such a thing. I was too proud. I think I must have felt that his parents would feel that I was offering myself to them.… I just imagined how they would look at me, a simple little girl.

  “But Misha did visit my own home. At first we lived in a dugout hut, and then in a small house that we built ourselves. He had the bravery to tell my mother he liked me, but I kind of lied to my mother and said the two of us were just solving the problems of the Komsomol together. He spent the night on a little bed in the house, and I stayed with neighbors.

  “He could be so cool and businesslike sometimes. Once at a Komsomol meeting, in front of everyone at the local cinema house, he was angry with me for not finishing on time a little newspaper we put out. And despite our friendship, he reprimanded me in front of everyone, saying that I’d failed, that I was late. He was shouting a bit, disciplining me. Then afterward it was as if nothing had happened. He said, ‘Let’s go to the movies.’ I was at a loss. I couldn’t understand why he did what he did, and I said so. He said, ‘My dear, one thing has nothing to do with another.’

  “That reminds me: Years later I was living way outside of the city with my mother, and the commute was very long and we had hardly any room. By then Gorbachev was in the Central Committee. And so I wrote him a letter, asking him to help me. I wanted to get permission to move into the city center and get an apartment. I reminded him who I was, in case he had forgotten. I got the letter back soon after, and on it he had written simply that it wasn’t his area, it wasn’t his job, and that I should apply to the city authorities, not him. Just like that, so businesslike. Not one warm word. Deep in my heart I had hoped he would help me, but I suppose he wanted to avoid even the appearance of favoritism.

  “In school, it was all very innocent. We never said things like ‘I love you’ to each other. He would never say such things. And on the rare times he put his arm around my shoulder, as if to say, come, let’s go to the movies or somewhere, I would kind of glance over at his hand. No, it wasn’t like our young people today. I finished school first, and went off first to Moscow. But I had no money and could not find any place to live. Remember, this was still a hard time, and so I returned to my village to work as a teacher. I’ve always thought that Gorbachev somehow thought I was weak for having come home.

  “When he went off to the law faculty of Moscow State University, he wrote letters to me telling me how much he liked Moscow and the abundance of things and the fascinating people. There was never a sense in his letters that he felt any lack of confidence because he was a village boy. There were many letters, and later, when I was married, my husband was so jealous he burned them all. I suppose he didn’t know Misha would be general secretary. I’m so sorry those letters are all gone.

  “I’ll tell you how it was. I think in the end I felt I was not really good enough for him, or we didn’t really fit. He was too energetic, too serious, so organized. And he was smarter than I was. He was the center of attention. We drifted apart. Things were getting lost. But he did send me a letter at the end with his picture, and on it he wrote ‘Dum spiro spero,’ Latin for ‘While I am breathing, I am hoping.’ I suppose I didn’t want to acknowledge that he was getting farther than me in life, so I said to myself, ‘Okay, Misha, live and write as you like, but as for me …’ I accepted a job in the Soviet far east, but even before I got there, on the road so to say, I was married.

  “The few people now who know that Misha and I were good friends sometimes ask me about Raisa Maksimovna. I like Raisa. She plays her role very well. She’s intelligent, and there’s obviously a lot of love there between the two of them. She helps him greatly, that’s clear enough. I’m not envious of her. I cannot say I am glad, just that my destiny is my destiny. I see things as a realist. When I do think back to those days, I see it as a pleasant island of time. Sometimes when I watch him on television I think to myself, ‘Poor Mikhail Sergeyevich. He is so tired, and he has the weight of the world on his shoulders. If he could only take out ten minutes and just be Misha for a while.’ I think of how nice everything was back then. I see that moon in the country sky, and the little river and everything was so lovely.”

  Gorbachev came to Moscow in September 1950. At Moscow State University, where he would study law until 1955, he took a room with six others at the Stromynka student dormitory. The crumbling, overcrowded dorm had once been a barracks for the soldiers of Peter the Great. Gorbachev had one jacket and one pair of decent pants to put in his closet. “Gorbachev was a villager, and you might have expected him to seem worse off than the city boys, but we were all poor then, and our new surroundings were no better,” said Rudolf Kolchanov, an editor at the labor newspaper Trud, who roomed with Gorbachev for three years.

  Zdenek Mlynar, a Czech Communist and another of Gorbachev’s college friends, arrived at the same time in Moscow as an exchange student from Prague and recalled a Moscow of “poverty and backwardness … a huge village of wooden cottages” where people had barely enough to eat, where
“most families lived in one room and instead of flush toilets there was only an opening leading directly to a drainpipe.” In his memoir of the Prague Spring, Mlynar wrote that in Moscow at the time “what you didn’t hold on to tightly would be stolen from you in a crowd, drunks lay unconscious in the streets and could be dead for all the passersby knew or cared.”

  Dressed in his baggy, hayseed clothes, Gorbachev tried doggedly to catch up with students who had gone to superior schools in the city. He often returned from the library at one or two in the morning and then stayed up another couple of hours talking with his roommates. Mlynar, Gorbachev, Kolchanov, and six war veterans would lock the door, turn a portrait of Stalin to the wall—revealing on the back an amateur portrait of a czarist-era courtesan—and drink and talk the night away. “Yes, it could be grim and wild even,” Kolchanov said. “But Gorbachev seemed to avoid drinking too much. He was fastidious that way. That dorm room may have been the greatest classroom for all of us. We talked about everything from girls to more serious things: the latest exhibition or the latest artistic awards or historical event. Of course, one subject that was never mentioned was Stalin himself. That was too risky, even with the door closed.”