Glints of Steel Behind the Smile

By James Kelly

He has been described by those who have met him as bright, incisive, low-key and polite. He is a sometimes brisk-mannered man who asks lots of questions and soaks up detail. His style, so different from the stolid, intensely private behavior of most Soviet leaders, was captured at a Moscow polling station during last month's national elections. There, under the glare of television lights, stood Mikhail Gorbachev. Instead of keeping his family away from the spotlight, he had brought along his wife Raisa, 52, their daughter Irina and granddaughter Oksana. After sealing his ballot, Gorbachev carefully placed it in the box. When photographers asked him to repeat the scene, he declined, jocularly noting he was allowed to vote only once.

It was not the first time that Gorbachev had displayed such public affability. During a visit to Britain in December, he delighted his hosts with his banter. On a tour of the British Museum, where Karl Marx wrote part of Das Kapital, he mused, "If people don't like Marxism, they should blame the British Museum." Later, as photographers clicked away, Gorbachev pleaded for a respite: "Comrades, economize your supplies." Yet the British also found Gorbachev a cool, reflective man quite capable of a steely riposte. When a Conservative Member of Parliament asked about the persecution of religious minorities in the Soviet Union, Gorbachev shot back: "You govern your society and you leave us to govern ours." The visitor's annoyance, the M.P. recalled, was "electrifying."

Such incidents are being closely examined for what they reveal about Gorbachev, a stocky, balding man with a wine-colored birthmark on his forehead.* Trained as a lawyer, he is the first Soviet leader born after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and the best educated since Lenin. His speech underscores his upbringing: his mastery of Russian grammar is superior to that of most of his Kremlin predecessors. He is the exemplar of the New Guard, which represents a generation raised after the Stalinist horrors and for which the catastrophe of World War II is an adolescent memory. Though much about Gorbachev remains a mystery, his

rapid rise through party ranks suggests an adroit politician who has been able to advance under leaders as different in style as Brezhnev and Andropov.

Though Gorbachev may exhibit a more amiable personality than his predecessors, there is no reason to doubt that he is cut from the same ideological cloth. Despite his relative youth, he has not openly identified with the aspirations of Soviet citizens under age 30, who now make up half the population. His speeches at home often ring with the same doctrinaire phraseology as those of his most orthodox Politburo colleagues. Totally a product of his party's system, Gorbachev flourished by avoiding risks, not by taking them.

What is different about Gorbachev is his ability to steer away from political cant when talking with Westerners. He is also able to mask his feelings when the occasion calls for it. When French President Francois Mitterrand mentioned Soviet Dissident Andrei Sakharov during a state banquet in the Kremlin last June, Konstantin Chernenko and Andrei Gromyko looked annoyed, but Gorbachev betrayed no emotion. "He has great control," said a French diplomat. "He was the only one who did not show anything."

His travels abroad have given Gorbachev more contact with the world outside the Soviet Union than most Politburo members have had. During a two-week tour of Canada in May 1983, Gorbachev impressed officials with his straightforward, modest approach and his grasp of agricultural statistics. "Unlike other Soviet figures, he didn't need a brief," says a high-level Canadian official. "He was a quick learner." At one point, then Canadian Agriculture Minister Eugene Whelan bluntly told Gorbachev that he hoped the Soviets would continue their system, because "as long as you do, you will remain inefficient and will be the best market Canada could have." The translators, recalls a Whelan aide, were shocked, but Gorbachev enjoyed the exchange.

Gorbachev's trip to Britain was even more successful in putting a human face on the Soviet leadership. His appetite for technical matters became obvious during his tour of an agricultural research center and an auto factory. During nearly 3 1/2 hours of talks with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Gorbachev spoke knowledgeably about arms control and East-West issues. Observed a Foreign Office diplomat: "It's nice to find a Soviet politician whose face moves. Even when he scowls, you know where you stand."

Raisa Gorbachev made almost as big a hit in London as her husband. A former student of philosophy at Moscow State University, the chic and slender Mrs. Gorbachev showed up at one reception wearing a white satin evening dress and a pair of gold lame sandals. Photographers were so captivated by her that they presented her with a bouquet when she left. Mrs. Gorbachev and her future husband met as students in the 1950s. Their daughter, who is believed to be in her late 20s, and son-in-law reportedly are both doctors.

In some ways Gorbachev owes his rise to hometown connections. The future Soviet leader was born in 1931 in the fertile Stavropol region of southern Russia, where Yuri Andropov also was born and where Mikhail Suslov, the country's leading ideologist until his death in January 1982, had worked for several years. Gorbachev's first job was driving a tractor. In 1950 he made a significant leap forward by gaining entrance to Moscow State University. Admission is notoriously hard to win; unless a student is exceptionally talented, he needs family influence to enter. The farm boy apparently got his boost from a good work record and from local party officials who had been impressed by the ambitious youth.

Gorbachev joined the Communist Party in 1952, while he was still in school. Lev Yudovich, a fellow student who knew Gorbachev slightly, remembers him as a "gray," or average, student who enjoyed slapping backs as much as hitting the books. "He didn't have a lot of original ideas," recalls Yudovich, who left the Soviet Union in 1977 and now teaches at the U.S. Army Russian Institute in West Germany. "But he made an effort to be everybody's buddy." Gorbachev soon was devoting as much time to party activities as to his studies. After graduating with a law degree in 1955, he decided on a career as a party professional. He returned to Stavropol, where he specialized in running collective farms. In 1970, at age 39, he was named first secretary of the regional party organization.

In 1978 Gorbachev made his second major move: he went to Moscow as a member of the Secretariat of the Central Committee, a kind of inner cabinet that runs the Soviet Union from day to day. He was apparently being pushed upward by Suslov, who was something of a mentor to him. Once in Moscow, Gorbachev reportedly established an almost filial relationship with an even more influential patron: Andropov. The then KGB chief is believed to have been behind the 1980 decision to make Gorbachev a full member of the Politburo at the remarkably young age of 49. Between 1978 and 1984 Gorbachev was in charge of the country's agriculture. Despite a string of disastrous Soviet harvests, which normally would have doomed the future of the man in charge, Gorbachev's career flowered. After Andropov became General Secretary in 1982, it is believed that he relied on Gorbachev as his closest lieutenant.

Though Gorbachev was rumored to be Andropov's chosen heir, he failed to make it to the top after the leader's death in February 1984. Yet there was little doubt who was second-in-command behind Chernenko. Gorbachev ran the Secretariat and brought loyalists into key party jobs. His reported chairing of Politburo meetings as early as last summer would have made him the de facto leader of the Soviet Union. His ascension last week formally acknowledged what has long been known in the Kremlin: the boy from Stavropol is a practiced politician of formidable skills. It is now the world's turn to learn about the substance behind the style.

FOOTNOTE: *Western doctors suspect that Gorbachev's birthmark is a hemangioma, which is caused by an increase in small blood vessels within and beneath the skin. Soviet newspapers routinely airbrush the mark out of his photographs.

With reporting by Erik Amfitheatrof/Moscow