Word: communist
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
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...
...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...
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...
...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...