Stavropol, South Russia: In Search of Gorbachev’s Roots
PEOPLE OF MY GENERATION — WESTERNERS at least — who grew up at the tail-end of the Cold War can still get a bit starry-eyed about Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, the former Soviet premier who celebrated his ninetieth birthday in March this year. Leader from 1985 to 1991, he seemed to end the Cold War overnight, showed us “communism with a human face” and appeared at pains to sign away the nuclear weapons we had spent our childhoods cowering from.
A leader popular enough to get a nickname, to us he was “Gorby”, the man in the black trilby, the approachable Soviet premier that Margaret Thatcher could “do business with”. He was the communist who made Reagan revise his estimates of the USSR as “an Evil Empire” and consign the phrase to “another time, another era.”
Yet in Russia itself, away from metropolitan liberal circles, pro-Gorby declarations are usually met with pity or contempt. In his own country, he is remembered as the windbag with port wine stains — “Misha the Marked” — the apparatchik who harangued them with interminable speeches in a Wurzel-like Southern burr and let them down where it really mattered. He left the economy in ruins, the shops empty, the queues for household goods a daily torment.
With his (a radical restructuring of Soviet life) and (openness) he managed to break up an empire, shaking the USSR so hard it came to pieces in his
