Word: stavropol
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...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 of constituents' complaints, while continuing his Komsomol work...
...Union. Nikita Khrushchev had taken over and was winding down the terror. Ghostly figures began drifting back into Moscow from the labor camps. But at the 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...
...event, the Stavropol period remains the most obscure of Gorbachev's life. It is known that he rose fast, from a minor job in the local Komsomol to its first secretary after less than a year, then through a variety of Komsomol and, later, party jobs. By 1962, when he was only 31, he was choosing party members for promotion throughout Stavropol Krai. Finally in 1970, at the age of 39, he became first secretary of the territory, a job equivalent to governor of an area roughly the size of South Carolina, with about 2.4 million people. Along...
...Gorbachev showed an avid interest in the press. Vladimir Maximov, a writer now living in Paris who worked for a Stavropol Komsomol newspaper in the 1950s, recalls that the young official often visited the paper's offices for a chat. "He would sit down with us in a casual manner," says Maximov. "We would uncork a bottle of wine ((for all his antialcoholism campaigning, Gorbachev still enjoys an occasional drink)) and 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...
Gorbachev's interest in the press continued throughout the Stavropol period. As party boss of the area, he often met with regional journalists for talks similar to those he now holds in Moscow with the national press. Unlike other party officials, he would stress that it was not enough for the journalists to write articles that were ideologically correct; they also had to be interesting. "Is anyone reading what you write?" he would...