Michael Dobbs - Down with Big Brother

Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev was born on March 2, 1931, in the village of Privolnoye in the fertile steppes that stretch northward from the Caucasus Mountains. In Russian the word privolnoye has two connotations: wide, open spaces and freedom. There was a sense of both in the northern Caucasus. The area was populated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by Cossack peasants fleeing serfdom in Russia and Ukraine. In return for their freedom, the Cossacks helped defend the southern border of the Russian empire from the Muslim tribes of the Caucasus. There was enough land for everybody. Misha’s maternal great-grandparents had moved here from Ukraine; his paternal great-grandparents were from the Voronezh region of central Russia.

The Ukrainian side of the family, the Gopkolos, appear to have supplied Gorbachev with his charisma and romantic spirit. He inherited the dark brown eyes of his Ukrainian grandmother, Vasilisa, and the talkativeness and occasional stubbornness of his mother. It was Vasilisa who decided to have him baptized, at the height of Stalin’s persecution of the Orthodox Church. He remembered the Ukrainian folk songs that he learned from his mother and grandmother and as general secretary would occasionally sing them to his guests in his soft baritone. 38The Russian side of the family had given him a sense of moderation and a willingness to compromise. His facial characteristics, particularly his smile, resemble those of his father, Sergei. 39

The year of Gorbachev’s birth coincided with Stalin’s murderous collectivization campaign. Determined to catapult backward Russia into the ranks of the industrialized countries, the dictator decreed that peasants pool their land and machinery in giant state-run kolkhozes, or collective farms. In order to drive independent farmers out of business and increase the supply of food and labor to the cities, he used the technique of compulsory procurement quotas. Anyone who showed even token resistance to the new order was dubbed a “class enemy” and relentlessly persecuted.

The consequences of forced collectivization were particularly dramatic in the northern Caucasus, the Russian breadbasket, and Ukraine. Robert Conquest, the chronicler of the “harvest of sorrow,” estimates that roughly one million people died in the northern Caucasus alone as the result of the famine of the early thirties. 40Hundreds of thousands of rich peasants, or kulaks, were deported. Sometimes entire families were wiped out. The mortality rate among children under the age of two was particularly high. For a village boy, the chances of surviving this man-made disaster were little better than one in two. In his memoirs Gorbachev recalls the large number of empty, half-destroyed houses in his village, whose occupants had died of hunger. 41

Nearly every family in the land was touched by the terror, and the Gorbachevs were no exception. In 1934, when Misha was only three, his paternal grandfather, Andrei, was denounced by a neighbor for hiding grain and “sabotaging” the spring sowing plan. A stubborn individualist, Andrei Gorbachev had refused to join the collective farms that were being established in the Stavropol region during these years. After a typically farcical trial he was sent off to Siberia to cut timber. Deprived of their principal means of support, the family swiftly became destitute. Within months three out of Andrei’s six children had died of starvation.

The fact that Gorbachev managed to survive at all was probably due to his Ukrainian grandfather, Panteley Yefimovich Gopkalo, who played a key role in the early collectivization campaign. As the first chairman of the local collective farm Grandfather Gopkalo was one of the most powerful men in the village. One of his jobs was to extract grain from the other peasants, including, presumably, Andrei Gorbachev. But then, in 1937, at the peak of the purges, Panteley Gopkalo was arrested in the middle of the night and accused of belonging to “an underground right-Trotskyist counterrevolutionary organization.” The transformation of persecutors into persecuted was a reflection of the general paranoia of the times. Gorbachev recalls that his own home became a “plague house,” which nobody dared visit for fear of being associated with an “enemy of the people.” “Even the neighbors’ kids refused to have anything to do with me,” he recalled in his memoirs. “This is something that remained with me for the rest of my life.” 42

In a typically Soviet twist of fate, Grandfather Gopkalo was released and rehabilitated shortly before the outbreak of war. He served for a further seventeen years as chairman of the Red October collective farm, insisting, “Stalin has no idea what the NKVD [secret police] is doing.”

Political repression was so widespread in the thirties that it was impractical for the party to limit recruitment to workers and peasants with completely clean family records. Many of Gorbachev’s colleagues had similar skeletons in their personal files. That in itself was not an obstacle to high office, provided they kept quiet about it. To have raised such a matter in public would have raised doubts about one’s “political reliability.” So for almost six decades Gorbachev never talked about the sufferings of his family. He did not ask to see KGB files on his grandfathers until after the abortive hard-line coup of August 1991. As he later explained, he was unable to break through the “spiritual barrier” of loyalty to the Communist Party. 43

It is a measure of the psychological legacy of Stalinism that Gorbachev, like many others, was unable to rid himself of the illusion that a noble purpose had been served by all this suffering. The sacrifices of those close to him became a reason not for rejecting the Soviet system but for continuing to believe in it. “Am I supposed to turn my back on my grandfather, who was committed to the Socialist idea?” Gorbachev asked rhetorically in November 1990. “Can I 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 father and all they did?” 44

For the older generation of Soviet officials, the salient fact of Gorbachev’s biography was that he was the first general secretary too young to participate in what Russians call the Great Patriotic War. It is hard to overestimate the central place of the war in Soviet life—it took the lives of twenty million Soviet citizens—and the impact it had on the way of thinking of successive leaders. For men like Brezhnev and Andropov, the memory of how the Germans had reached the gates of Moscow and Leningrad in a four-month blitzkrieg in 1941 held ever-present lessons. It explained their obsession with security, their paranoid fears of foreign encirclement, their deeply ingrained conservatism. Experience had taught them that it was fatal ever to relax their guard. For them, the victory over the Nazi invader was the ultimate proof of the superiority of the Communist system. Without Stalin’s forced industrialization, the Soviet Union would never have been able to produce the tanks and guns that eventually enabled the Red Army to triumph over the most formidable military machine the world had ever known. Without the purges and show trials, the country would have been racked by internal division.

When the Germans invaded, Gorbachev was only ten. The Nazi occupation of the Stavropol region lasted too short a time—just five months—to make much impression on him. Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, who survived the nine-hundred-day siege of Leningrad and went on to become military adviser to the future gensek , had a typical older man’s reaction to this lack of wartime experience. Gorbachev, he wrote in his memoirs, represented a generation that had never been forced “to fight against Fascist tanks armed only with rifles and Molotov cocktails, to watch powerlessly as German warplanes swooped down on your comrades and yourself, to withdraw hundreds of kilometers [as the invader] burned our cities and villages, killed peaceful civilians, and destroyed our national wealth.” 45What Gorbachev had witnessed was the horrific aftermath of war: the hunger and cold; the uncertainty about the fate of one’s relatives; the backbreaking labor of reconstruction. The old soldier speculated that those experiences may have contributed to the “pacifist” inclinations of his boss.