Word: komsomols
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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...
...years ahead of Gorbachev, recalls having the young ideologue pointed out to him as someone to fear. There was reason to be wary of him: Neznansky asserts that when Gorbachev discovered that some fellow students had parents who were in political disgrace, he called for their expulsion from the Komsomol and perhaps from the university as well. Michel Tatu, a prominent French Kremlinologist and author of a forthcoming biography of Gorbachev, is convinced that he joined in the vicious anti-Semitic rhetoric of Stalin's last purge, launched just before the dictator's death in early 1953. Mlynar does...
...start of this period of ferment and change, Gorbachev removed himself and Raisa from the relative sophistication of Moscow and returned to the Stavropol area, where he was to stay for the next 23 years. According to Neznansky, the young graduate tried for a position with the Moscow Komsomol apparatus but lost out to a classmate and had little choice but to return to the provinces if he wanted to continue a career in party politics. It may be too that Gorbachev felt an obligation to the Stavropol Krai (territory) authorities, who had apparently paid part of his university expenses...
...came as young volunteers in search of adventure. Many stayed for the challenge and high pay of the Arctic frontier: salaries run around 500 rubles ($750) a month, nearly triple the national average. "Like many of my friends, I came out here in 1953 at the bidding of the Komsomol ((Young Communist League)) and also at the urging of my heart," said Alexander Bogdanov, 56, first secretary of the regional Communist Party. "We thought we would work here for three or four years. But as it turned out, we stayed...
Lyolya was a scruffy little fellow with a ragged beard who talked in conspiratorial whispers, exhaling a fetid odor of garlic, vodka and bad Soviet tobacco. He told Westerners he had been a leader of the Komsomol, the Communist youth group, at a higher-education institute but was expelled from the organization and the school when he spoke out against the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. He was Jewish and had applied to emigrate, he said, but his parents were influential party members who opposed his departure and blocked his exit visa. He always wore a shabby old U.S. Army fatigue...