One's own among others, another's among one's own

In the village of Privoljnoye, in the Krasnogvardey region of the Stavroplsk Region, Mikhail Gorbachev's mother Maria Panteleyevna (née Gopkalo), who spent a whole century working on the collective farm, watches the broadcast of the funeral of the General Secretary of the CPSU Konstantin Chernyenko, at which her son spoke, which was present they interpret it as a sign that he will surely be elected as the new general secretary, to which she laments: "He didn't need that, he had a nice job, now everyone will only scold him!"

The former first secretary of the Krasnogvarde district committee of the CPSU of the Stavropol region, Grigory Gorlov, told the reporter of the newspaper "Argumenti i fakti" that at the age of 78, Maria Panteleyevna once set off on a long trip, when her son invited her to Moscow for a month. and one morning she appeared in the Kremlin with three freshly slaughtered chickens in her bag and a bag of fresh fruit. Ten days later she returned. When asked why she returned so quickly, she answered: "Because no one knows me in Moscow!"

Nikolai Aleksandrovich Zenkovich, a publicist who wrote several biographies of politically prominent people, writes that her neighbor Grigory Gorlov sometimes teased her: "You are the Tsar's mother!" And she pretended to lose her temper: "What kind of king!? We are simple people. Misha studied well, that's all. And he especially listened to his father's advice."

Mikhail Gorbachev's father, Sergei Andreyevich, a war invalid with shrapnel in his leg, holder of the Medal for Courage with two orders of the Red Star, worked after the war as a machine operator in the tractor station of the kolkhoz and passed on to his son a skill that played an important role in his life. Mikhail Gorbachev recalled with an expression of special pride: "By hearing, I can immediately determine what is wrong with the operation of the harvester." In 1949, eighteen-year-old Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev was awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labor for some record in the wheat harvest. As a decorated member of the Komsomol, he enrolled at the Faculty of Law of the Lomonosov University without an entrance exam and became a candidate for a member of the Communist Party of the USSR.

OLD LETTERS: For Gorbachev, with his country school education interrupted by the war, studying law in a city he had never been to was at first exhausting. But soon he met an ambitious student from the village, the self-confident and talkative Raisa. They got married during their studies, but without a ticket they could not visit each other in the dorm rooms. Raisa helped her husband to highlight the natural ambition of the determined, but occasionally studious and serious, even theatrical Gorbachev.

While he was on party duty in the Stavropol region, she was a professor at the university there. But Raisa's real glory came when Gorbachev took over as Soviet leader.

Russia today in an extensive biographical text about Gorbachev on his website, he writes that the new communist leader was not married to a matron hidden at home, but to an urbane, elegantly dressed woman, whom many considered his intellectual equal, if not superior.

Consulted his wife on every decision, which caused a lot of bad news, but he never tried to push her out of the center of events. During far-reaching negotiations with the West, she formed friendships with Margaret Thatcher, Nancy Reagan and Barbara Bush.

There, in the Crimean villa on Foros, during the attempted coup in August 1991, Raisa confronted the men who had personally betrayed her husband and suffered a stroke. She died eight years later of cancer, in a German hospital. For the tenth anniversary of Raisa's death, in 2009, Mikhail Gorbachev recorded the charity album "Songs about Raisa" with the famous Russian musician Andrey Makarevich, on which he sings the song "Stara pisma" in the style of a melancholic ballad from the 1940s, for which he was inspired during isolation during the failed coup in 1991 when he saw Raisa burning their student correspondence and crying after learning that their secret service agents flipped through love letters.

UNCLE MOUSE: After graduating in 1955, Gorbachev lasted only ten days at the Stavropol prosecutor's office (showing distaste for the less idealistic side of the Soviet apparatus), before running into a local Komsomol official. Over the next 15 years, his biography consists of a series of party promotions.

Chronicles say that, avoiding the habit of Soviet officials to barricade themselves inside furnished cabinets, he spent most of his time "in the field," talking to people about the harvest, broken projectors in local movie theaters, or food shortages. Well, the compatriots say that the car "Seagull" and a small plane belonged to him in formation, and that on some occasion he tapped the wing of that plane and said: "Raisa, my plane!"

At that time, the rock group Nejni May performed a song that many people liked to listen to:

"Uncle Misha, uncle Misha,
You are my dear grandfather,
Don't you hear?
How are they mocking us with you!"
("Uncle Michaud, dear Uncle Michaud, don't you hear how they scold us because of you...")

Uncle Misha Gorbachev, then regional secretary of the CP, begged his mother to influence that kid not to sing that song all around. That kid, Andrej Razin, grew up in his parents' house. He was brought by Valentina Mihailovna Gosteva, who was left without parents at an early age, and then without an adoptive father, so from the age of 15 she was a housekeeper in the Gorbachev family with whom she lived. When she lost her son, she went to the Svetlograd orphanage to donate his belongings, she saw an orphan on the fence, that Andrej, who begged her to take him with her. He came with her to the village of Privoljnoje and, entering a solid five-room house, he was surprised to see a portrait of the first secretary of the regional party committee, the same one that hung in the office of the director of the orphanage. Astonished, he asked her who it was, and she said, "This is my son." From then on, the Gorbachev family took care of him.

Komsomol: Her son was the head of the Stavropol Territory, where 2,5 million people lived. There is not only a granary, but also a resort where the top party leaders of the USSR regularly visited: General Secretary Brezhnev, who met Gorbachev during one of his visits; party ideologue Mihail Suslov, who considered Stavropol as his power base; Prime Minister Alexei Kosygin; head of the KGB, later General Secretary Yuri Andropov, who called him "my Stavropol diamond in the rough". That was his ticket to Moscow. With, in characteristic, some good results in the organization of the harvest, of course.

Without Stalin's regular purges and no democratic replacement mechanisms, between the mid-1960s and the 1980s almost the entire apparatus of the Soviet leadership remained unchanged. All but one of the ten members were over sixty, and most were in their seventies, many suffering from chronic conditions. Then God intervened: Brezhnev suffered from many circulatory diseases, he died of a heart attack in 1982. Andropov died of kidney failure in 1984. Konstantin Chernyenko, who had been ill before, died in 1985 of cirrhosis. Gorbachev was the seventh head of that party, after Lenin, Stalin, Malenkov, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko. And at the age of 54, he is the youngest.

In the first two years of his rule, that "Komsomolac" replaced two thirds of the Politburo, more than half of the regional heads and forty percent of the membership of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. "We all come to the same conclusion - we need loudness, we need criticism and self-criticism. With us, everything concerns the people, because it is their country", said Gorbachev.

Many dissidents were released from prison, academician Sakharov, who was on hunger strike, was returned from exile in December 1986. Archives have been opened that document the repressions from the Stalin era, which also involved Gorbachev's family. His maternal grandfather, Pantelei Efimovich, was in pre-trial detention for fourteen months in 1937 on suspicion of being a member of a Trotskyist organization, and his paternal grandfather, Andrey Moiseyevich, an individual peasant who did not want to join the collective farm, was sent as a "saboteur" to forced labor, cutting down forests in the Irkutsk region, due to failure to fulfill the grain sowing plan, because there was nothing to sow in a year of famine in which three of Andrei's six children died.

EMPTY CASH: Just as Gorbachev became the head of the party and state in March 1985, Saudi Arabia decided to increase oil production, which dropped its price from $27 a gallon in 1985 to less than $10 in 1986. resulted in a drastic reduction of budget revenues for the USSR.

The situation in the treasury was worsened by the boomerang of Perestroika, which since May 1986 was a symbol of Gorbachev's rule. The law on cooperation, adopted in May 1988, did not result in investment in production, but the founders of cooperation with state enterprises and their directors were able to get rich through speculation - the resale of cheap state resources. The budgetary effect of Gorbachev's fight against alcoholism, as a symptom of Soviet decline, was a decrease in the budget revenue from sales tax in 1987 by eight billion rubles compared to 1984, because a quarter of the total tax came from the retail sale of alcohol. The channels of trade of goods were interrupted, the republics began to prevent the delivery of goods to others, in some parts of the country taxes could no longer be collected.

The gold reserves of the USSR were exhausted and reduced to only 80 tons of the precious metal. In August 1991, the Soviet Union was only a month away from bankruptcy.

THE END OF THE COLD WAR - AND THE "WINNER COMPLEX": In such circumstances, Gorbachev, with the concessions of a convinced pacifist (and the head of the state in disarray!), ended the strategic negotiations with the Westerners that were initiated by Andropov during his mandate. The historic summit of Reagan and Gorbachev in Reykjavík in 1986 formally ended in failure, but then the process that would end the Cold War was initiated.

In 1987, the important INF agreement was reached, on the prohibition of intermediate ballistic missiles; then the CFE, which reduced the military build-up in Europe in 1990 and the following year; then the START agreement, which reduced the total nuclear stockpile. A series of practical moves followed - the withdrawal of the army from Eastern Europe, the unification of Germany, and the withdrawal from Afghanistan. Gorbachev won the Nobel Peace Prize and was hailed by the Western public as a man who changed the course of history.

In Russia, they do not share that opinion. Historian Roy Medvedev, for example, assesses: "Gorbachev did not know how to lead the country's foreign policy and took foreign leaders at their word." They gave him his word and suggested: 'Maybe we should come to an agreement?', and he replied: 'No, no, your word is enough for us.' But presidents change: now one, in four years another. And oral promises of this kind in America and England are not considered binding, because they are easy to refuse. During Gorbachev's time, a huge number of international events directly related to the USSR were framed only by speeches and negotiations, without being fixed in documents... Quick, but not a traitor", sums up Roy Medvedev.

Gorbachev himself will state with disappointment: "In the West, they fell ill from a serious disease - the complex of the winners in the Cold War." When Russia found itself in a difficult position after the collapse of the USSR, it simply began to be pushed aside from the political and historical arena. The developed West took advantage of the position of a country that was not ready to live in market conditions. As soon as Russia started to rise from its knees, it was shown that it was not suitable for the West." This is what Gorbachev said in an interview with the opposition newspaper "Nezavisimaya Gazeta" on August 15, 2006, that is, a year before Putin's Munich speech, which represented a red scarf for Western politicians.

PERESTROIKA AND PERESTRIELKA: As the once solid structure of the Soviet state crumbled and the international situation intensified, smoldering ethnic conflicts on the periphery of the USSR flared up. Communists and nationalists often looked like one and the same in the new circumstances.

Perestroika turned into a perestroika. At that time it was believed (your chronicler also) that one of the undoubted merits of Gorbachev was that he prevented the "Yugoslav scenario" and civil war between the former republics of the ethnically complex USSR. That was not entirely true. Many parts of the USSR were already affected by ethnically based civil wars: in Tajikistan, Moldova (which is still smoldering), Armenia, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, in Nagorno-Karabakh in the Transcaucasian Republic of Azerbaijan, in Georgia, in Lithuania.

The intervention of Soviet soldiers and the KGB's special-purpose unit Alpha in Lithuania put the pacifist Gorbachev, who advocated resolving the conflict through dialogue, not war, into an uncomfortable situation - if he really knew nothing about it, as he claimed, then he was an ineffective leader who has no control over remote territories and over his own special forces; and if he knew about the fighting in Vilnius, then he turned out to be a callous liar. Hardliners were disappointed that the intervention was quickly ended, and democratic reformers were horrified by the scenes in Vilnius.

After the riots and military intervention in Georgia, things got complicated in the long run. Abkhazia, Adjara and South Ossetia declared independence. At some point, Georgia managed to get Adjara back, but when Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, supported and armed by Western countries, tried to seize South Ossetia in 2008, Russia intervened and was the only one to recognize South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent nations. There was no civil war in Russia itself in 1990, but there were two bloody wars in Chechnya later. And the conflict in Ukraine broke out later, in 2014, and after eight years it seems to have turned into a world conflict...

THE KING WITHOUT AN ENGAGEMENT: Political scientists and historians describe that period with the term "sovereignty parade". In order to at least prevent the total collapse of the state, or at least to ensure its peaceful course, in March 1991, Gorbachev announced a referendum in which 74 percent of the citizens declared for the survival of the community.

That result is overshadowed by the fact that in six of the fifteen republics the referendum was not held and that the referendum question was ambiguous, because it first mentions the survival of the community, and then the sovereignty of the republics. After that, Gorbachev organizes constitutional negotiations of representatives of the republican leaders. An agreement is reached on some kind of loose confederation of sovereign republics with international subjectivity, which has a common army and some kind of central government and president, and the participants one after another publicly declare that they consider this confederation to be a state after all.

Eight stubborn officials of the federal leadership, called the State Committee for a State of Emergency, are trying to prevent this. They declare that the President of the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev, is temporarily unable to perform his duties due to his health condition, and by sending tanks to the streets of Moscow, they are trying to implement the so-called August Putsch in 1991. .

Many books have been written about how Boris Yeltsin climbed a tank, how that coup failed, how the coup plotters were arrested and later tried and amnestied, and some killed themselves, and how Gorbachev was flown back to Moscow by Yeltsin's loyalists as some kind of king without entourage, whom Yeltsin publicly humiliated in the following days in front of delegates and TV cameras.

Gorbachev's power was so reduced that he could not, and probably no longer wanted to, prevent the Belovezhsky Agreement - the Pact on the Union of Independent States between Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, which declared on December 22 that the Soviet Union would cease to exist, and on December 25. In December 1991, after a five-hour conversation, he handed Yeltsin the "atomic shaft" and announced in a public address that he was resigning. The red flag of the USSR was removed from the Kremlin tower.

Gorbachev saw the collapse of the USSR as a personal drama until the end of his life, according to his own words. In the public, the blame for that was attributed more to him, who tried to maintain and reform the state he was at the head of, than to those who worked on its dismantling, including Yeltsin, with whom, they say, he did not speak for the rest of his life.

Historian Roy Medvedev reflects this opinion when he tends to compare him with the last Romanov. He says, namely, that in the same way the role of Nicholas II in the October Revolution of 1917 is greater than the role of Lenin: because the last Russian emperor led the country to a coup d'état, and Lenin only took into his hands what Nicholas II dropped...

AFTER THE KREMLIN: After leaving power, Gorbachev tried to continue his political activity. He founded the Social Democratic Party and ran for president in 2003. He received only 0,51 percent of the vote. He was the founder of the opposition newspaper Nezavisimaja Gazeta, in which he invested money from the Nobel Prize. He wrote dozens of books, among them "Alone with myself" (2012), "After the Kremlin" (2014), "I remain an optimist" (2017)...

In 1997, he appeared in a commercial for a pizzeria chain Pizza Hut, and a manufacturer of leather goods Louis Vuitton (2007), which some Russians criticized as a humiliation of the former president. He dedicated the proceeds to his humanitarian agency.

The brick house that the collective farm built in 1973 for the parents of the first secretary of the Regional Committee remained empty. After the death of her husband, Gorbachev's mother Maria Panteleevna lived there alone and grew everything she needed in the garden, cucumbers, cabbage, carrots. Her brother, who lived in the house next door, her sister and friends took turns to keep her company at night, because she was afraid to stay alone at night. While Gorbachev was in power, the house was under security, whose members complained about trespassing in their gardens. When he resigned, local authorities stopped paying attention to her.

She didn't ask for anything from her family even when she started to improve. According to the newspaper "Argumenti i fakti", she sold the house to the music producer of the rock group Nežni maj, Andrej Razin. When, after the sale of the house, she complained that she could not receive a pension without housing papers, that musician made a contract with her for a lifetime annuity, then announced it in the local newspaper, and a scandal broke out about how it was that Mikhail Gorbachev's mother could found himself in such a position. Gorbachev was then in Italy to talk with the Pope, when he returned he called Razina and cursed him, and then requested that the prosecutor's office open a case for fraud, but the prosecutor replied that everything was according to the law. He sued Razin for two years and in the end, in the process of reconciliation, he bought his parents' family house from him with the intention of building a museum there, but it didn't work out.

After the reconciliation, Gorbachev even came to the premiere of the feature film Gentle May. When asked if what Razin showed in the film was true, he answered bitterly, as the victims of Perestroika say: "Talented scoundrel. Ostap Bender". ¶