Word: generality
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
...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...
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...
...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...
...local school and continued to teach for the next 23 years. When her husband was summoned back to Moscow in 1978 to take charge of Soviet agriculture, Raisa became a lecturer in Marxist-Leninist philosophy at Moscow State University. Though she gave up the post after Gorbachev became General Secretary in 1985, she evidently remains very much the intellectual, accompanying Mikhail to cultural performances and displaying a command of foreign books. During the December summit she told Joyce Carol Oates that she had read the novelist's book Angel of Light and said it was well liked in the U.S.S.R...