Moscow's Vigorous Leader

By George J. Church.

Though he has been in power less than six months, Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev has already become a more vibrant presence to the 278 million citizens of the U.S.S.R. than his recent aged and often ailing predecessors. Promising a top-to-bottom shakeup of the lethargic state bureaucracy, cracking down on alcoholism, mingling with street crowds in the manner of a handshaking, baby-kissing American politician, Gorbachev (pronounced Gor-ba- choff) is the most vigorous Soviet leader in a generation. At 54, he could be expected to have a long career as the ruler of a superpower. His personality and political instincts ensure that the Western world will see much of him. But to date his unofficial meetings with the West have been few. Last week he invited the editors of TIME to his Kremlin office for the first private interview he has given to a Western news organization since assuming power. His goal: to deliver a major message to the West, one that would elaborate his deep concerns--and his hopes--for U.S.-Soviet relations.

In 2 hr. 12 min. of conversation--a full hour more than he had scheduled --Gorbachev showed himself well informed, urbane, energetic, tough, witty and above all in possession of a disciplined intellect. He reflected most elements of the traditional Soviet hard line, but not in the familiar pedantic Soviet style. His main points, some delivered as written replies to questions submitted in advance, others made orally and spontaneously:

On U.S.-Soviet relations: "That situation today is highly complex, very tense. I would even go so far as to say it is explosive." The reason, said Gorbachev, is that in the roughly two months since he agreed to a November summit meeting with President Reagan in Geneva, the U.S. has rejected every overture from the Soviet Union, such as its proposals for moratoriums on tests of nuclear and antisatellite weapons, as "one more propaganda exercise by Moscow." Because of this "shortage of responsibility" in Washington, relations between the superpowers "are continuing to deteriorate, the arms race is intensifying, and the war threat is not subsiding."

On prospects for the summit: "It looks as if the stage is being set (by Washington) for a bout between some kind of political 'supergladiators,' with the only thought in mind being how best to deal a deft blow at the opponent." He implied that the U.S. is deliberately trying to engineer a failure. There is still time to prepare to reach specific agreements, but not much time, he said. In fact, "the train might have already left the station."

On arms control: Unless the U.S. agrees to stop work on its Star Wars program, which aims to develop a shield against atomic warheads, "it will not be possible to reach an agreement on the limitation and reduction of (offensive) nuclear weapons either . . . Thus, if the present U.S. position on space weapons is its last word, the Geneva negotiations will lose all sense." (The reference was not to the forthcoming summit but to arms- limitation talks already under way in the Swiss city.) But Gorbachev was significantly more flexible on the issue of defensive research than his negotiators have been.

On his domestic policy: "Our most important, top priority task" is to bring about "radical improvement" in the performance of the Soviet economy, but this does not necessarily mean setting "new records in producing metals, oil, cement, machine tools or other products. The main thing is to make life better for people." He pledged both to "further strengthen centralization in strategic areas of the economy" and "at the same time . . . to broaden the autonomy of production associations, enterprises, collective and state farms." He would accomplish this, he said, in part by using "such tools as profit, pricing, credit and self-sufficiency of enterprises," all designed to achieve less, not more, central control. Contradictory though his program might be, Gorbachev implied that his stress on revving up the Soviet economy would require a relatively peaceful, stable relationship with the rival superpower if he is to realize his goals. At the end of the interview, he asked his visitors to "ponder one thing . . . What are the external conditions that we need to be able to fulfill those domestic plans? I leave the answer to that question with you." The answer he clearly meant to be given was relaxation of tension and slowing of the arms race, if only Washington would let that happen. But throughout the interview, he made clear that he, like his predecessors, wanted detente on Soviet terms.

On his glad-handing personal style: "It is nothing new in my practice . . . I did that kind of thing in Stavropol," the southern Russian region where Gorbachev got his start. "Maybe on occasion when I have been traveling in the country, the press has given it more prominence . . . But also I should say there was a need to go out and meet people more . . . It is not a question of whether I enjoy that style or not. You cannot work otherwise." If such remarks came from a Western politician, they would seem routine, but it is difficult to imagine any other Soviet leader discussing personal style as a tool of governing. Most have taken the stony approach of Andrei Gromyko, longtime Foreign Minister and now President of the U.S.S.R., who once told a Western interviewer, "My personality does not interest me."

That was not the only way in which Gorbachev gave the impression of being a new type of Kremlin leader. He sprinkled his remarks with knowledgeable but unostentatious references to an American newspaper columnist, Third World poverty and the technology of Star Wars weaponry. He displayed a talent for vivid metaphor unheard in the Kremlin since the days of Nikita Khrushchev. Sample: "Certain people in the U.S. are driving nails into this structure of our relationship, then cutting off the heads. So the Soviets must use their teeth to pull them out." He made political points with biting humor, at one point inviting the U.S. to reply to what it views as Soviet propaganda "according to the principle of 'an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.' " For example, Gorbachev went on, if Moscow announced a suspension of nuclear tests (as it did seven weeks ago), "you Americans could take revenge by doing likewise. You could deal us yet another propaganda blow, say, by suspending the development of one of your new strategic missiles. And we would respond with the same kind of 'propaganda.' "

His performance indicated that the Great Communicator in the White House may meet a worthy rival at Geneva. But the portents of the interview go far beyond their implications for the summit. Western Kremlinologists often observe that Gorbachev is young enough to be directing policy into the 21st century, if only he can consolidate his power. The commanding air he projected throughout his meeting with TIME gave some clues to the qualities that have brought him close to that goal in a phenomenally short time.

House Speaker Tip O'Neill, who led a delegation of four American Congressmen in a visit to Gorbachev in April, told him that he seemed to have come out of nowhere. Gorbachev replied with a smile that "in the Soviet Union, there are many places to hide." As late as 1978, he was well enough hidden that few Soviet citizens, let alone Americans, had ever heard his name. His biography until that point was brief: son of Stavropol peasants, law graduate of Moscow State University, holder of various regional Communist Party positions for 23 years. Much about the formative influences during his youth and early career remains obscure. It is not known, for example, whether he lived in Stavropol under the Nazi occupation in 1942-43, which began when he was eleven, or was among the many children evacuated to the East before German troops moved in.

As a regional administrator, Gorbachev caught the eye of two powerful patrons: Mikhail Suslov, who was for many years the Soviet Union's chief ideologist, and Yuri Andropov, longtime head of the KGB secret police. Suslov, who commanded partisan forces in the Stavropol area during World War II, kept tabs on promising young apparatchiks in the region. Andropov often vacationed at hot-springs resorts near Stavropol. Gorbachev in effect served as his host. Suslov and Andropov engineered Gorbachev's appointment to higher and higher posts in the regional party and, in 1978, his sudden call to Moscow as a member of the Communist Party Secretariat, a group of about ten officials who run the vast Soviet bureaucracy on a day-to-day basis. Gorbachev was given responsibility for all of Soviet agriculture. A rough American parallel would be the appointment of a little-known Governor of, say, South Dakota to be officially Secretary of Agriculture and unofficially a member of the President's inner circle of top advisers.

Just how Gorbachev made his way from there to become leader of the Soviet Union in a mere seven years is known only inside the Kremlin. Certainly his record as boss of Soviet farming was not glittering: grain harvests peaked just about the time he took over and have fallen sharply since, forcing the / U.S.S.R. to import more and more food. The job, indeed, has traditionally been a road to oblivion. Among the septuagenarians in the Politburo, which he joined as a candidate member in 1979 and full voting member a year later, he stood out primarily for his youth and energy. He seems to have used his positions in the Secretariat and later the Politburo to gain influence over who was rewarded and who was fired throughout the Soviet bureaucracy, in the process building a political machine inside the 300-member Communist Party Central Committee, theoretical parent body of both the Secretariat and Politburo.

Andropov, who became Soviet leader after the death of Leonid Brezhnev in 1982, continued to groom Gorbachev as a key lieutenant. After Andropov was incapacitated by kidney disease in late 1983, it was Gorbachev who reportedly shuttled daily from the Kremlin to the hospital outside Moscow where Andropov lay hooked up to a dialysis machine. "During his last months, Andropov ran the U.S.S.R. through Gorbachev," says one Soviet historian. Gorbachev's time to run the country in his own name had not yet come when Andropov died in February 1984. The Kremlin Old Guard conferred the leadership on the 72-year- old Konstantin Chernenko. But Chernenko was all too obviously an interim leader, and when he also became too ill to function, Gorbachev conducted the weekly Politburo meetings and headed the government in all but name. The final step occurred on March 10, 1985, when Chernenko died and the Secretariat elected Gorbachev General Secretary less than five hours later. Nominating Gorbachev for that post, Gromyko gave what has since become the standard one- line description of the new boss. Said Gromyko: "This man has a nice smile, but he has got iron teeth."

Gorbachev, 5-ft. 9-in., stocky and balding, has amply demonstrated both teeth and smile in a whirlwind half-year. He has taken hammer and sickle to the country's bureaucracy. To date, 22 of 121 regional Communist Party first secretaries and dozens of officials in major cities and republic ministries have been fired. At the top, Gorbachev has named four new voting members of the Politburo, bringing its membership to 13, and nine new government ministers. Grigory Romanov, 62, the Leningrad party boss who was widely considered to be Gorbachev's chief rival, was unceremoniously dumped from the Politburo and Secretariat; officially he resigned for reasons of health. Gromyko, 76, was artfully nudged upstairs to the prestigious but largely % ceremonial post of President and head of state, and replaced as Foreign Minister by Eduard Shevardnadze, 67, a white-haired Georgian with an engaging personality but no experience in foreign policy. The general interpretation placed on that move is that Gorbachev intends to have a major say in foreign policy details.

Still more sweeping changes are rumored to be on the way. Pledging to revive the economy and institute a new regime of discipline and hard work, Gorbachev warned in May that "those who do not intend to adjust and who are an obstacle to solving these new tasks must simply get out of the way." He followed up in June with a speech denouncing stodgy production ministries and their ministers. Tougher yet, he cited four of the incompetents by name. Moscow gossip has it that unless the Old Guard can somehow figure out a way to stop him before the Communist Party Congress meeting next February, an event that occurs only once every five years, Gorbachev will push out fully half of the 300 members of the Central Committee and replace them with his own loyalists. The military has not been spared Gorbachev's housecleaning instincts. Defense Minister Sergei Sokolov, 74, has been designated only a candidate member of the Politburo rather than a full member, as his immediate predecessors were, and a number of his subordinates have been replaced. On the other hand, Gorbachev has restored to grace Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov, 67, who was removed as chief of staff by Chernenko. Ogarkov has been made operational commander of the Soviet Union's western front. His ideas sometimes clash with mainstream military thinking; he is thought to favor more emphasis on conventional, and less on nuclear, weapons. Says one senior Western diplomat: "The military cannot be too happy with the way things are going."

The image-conscious Gorbachev has repeatedly flashed his smile on Soviet TV, visiting factories and plunging into street crowds to deliver off-the-cuff speeches. In Leningrad, a woman shouted to him, "Just get close to the people and they won't let you down." As the throng pressed in on him, Gorbachev shot back, "Can I get any closer?" In Kiev, he suffered a rare public slip of the tongue, twice referring to the country he leads as "Russia" before correcting himself to say "the Soviet Union, as we now call it, and as it in fact is." The mistake must have raised eyebrows and annoyed Georgians, Latvians, Uzbeks and Tatars as well as the Ukrainians he was addressing, but it ran on Soviet TV uncensored.

Wives of previous Soviet leaders have stayed so far in the background that Western observers were unsure whether Andropov's wife was still alive until she turned up at his funeral. Gorbachev's stylish wife Raisa, 52, who is a teacher of Marxist philosophy at Moscow University, is often at his side in public appearances, which is apparently a problem for Soviet editors. They run pictures in which she is standing beside Gorbachev, but they do not identify her in captions. The Gorbachevs are frequently accompanied by Daughter Irina, a physician in her late 20s, and Granddaughter Oksana, 5, giving Soviet citizens for the first time in years a kind of First Family to admire. However, Gorbachev's son-in-law, a doctor, remains mostly unseen.

Delighted Soviets are relishing the idea of having a leader who is not infirm, indeed one who is two decades younger than the leader of the U.S. Jokes about Gorbachev's relative youth abound. One has a worried Raisa asking Gorbachev why he has developed a red splotch on his face to match the birthmark on his forehead. Gorbachev supposedly replies, "It's those old geezers on the Politburo who keep pinching my cheek and saying, 'Nice going, kid.' "

None of this means that Gorbachev can be viewed as some kind of liberal, Kennedy-esque figure, despite his pledges to get the Soviet Union moving again. His patronage by two such stern figures as Suslov and Andropov would indicate an authoritarian strain in his character, even if Gorbachev's own incessant calls for "discipline" do not. In his funeral oration for Chernenko, Gorbachev put it this way: "We shall fight any manifestation of showiness and idle talk, swagger and irresponsibility, everything that contradicts the socialist norms of life." That is in line with a Russian tradition, reaching far back into Czarist times, in which "reform" calls for suppressing rather than tolerating opposition.

The most visible, and stunning, initial reform has been the crackdown on drinking. By Soviet official standards, Gorbachev is personally abstemious; he takes no more than one or two glasses of wine at diplomatic receptions and the like. He has valid reasons far beyond personal taste, however, to enforce similar restraint on his fellow citizens. Alcoholism has been so rampant among them that it has been widely blamed for the fact that in the Soviet Union, alone among industrial nations, life expectancy for males has actually dropped in recent years: it is 62 (U.S. male life expectancy is 71).

The extent of the crackdown has startled everyone, including government officials. Gorbachev has raised the legal drinking age from 18 to 21, reduced the number of liquor stores in operation, forced the remaining ones to open three hours later each day, and restricted production sharply. Alcohol may not be served in restaurants until 2 p.m., an hour so late that many establishments refuse to serve it at all. Soviet officials take the new edict very seriously; they prefer not to have their pictures taken holding a glass. The government is jacking up prices steeply. The price of vodka last week leaped 25%, to the ruble equivalent of about $6.80 a pint, a princely sum in a country where wages average around $300 a month.

The antialcohol crusade is just one early example of the rigorous approach Gorbachev intends to adopt to promote efficiency, self-discipline and pride in the Soviet system throughout the society. There are sure to be many other manifestations of his desire to carry out major changes. As he put it in his interview with TIME, "Everyone has got to restructure things, restyle his whole way of working and thinking."

But can Gorbachev overcome the very strong forces of inertia? Says Robert Legvold, associate director of Columbia University's Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union: "You cannot just walk in and change a relatively sclerotic system like the Soviet Union." Gorbachev's public pronouncements about economic reform have not gone much beyond the endlessly repeated stress on less goldbricking and harder work on the part of everyone from government ministers to factory hands and collective farmers. There is some talk of extending experiments in which the state agrees to buy a certain quantity of produce from farmers and permits them to keep and sell privately any additional food they can grow. The Soviet Union boasts world-class technology in weapons and military equipment, but technology in the civilian economy lags badly behind Western standards.

Still, Gorbachev has given little public sign of recognizing what nearly all Western experts, and a few in the U.S.S.R., consider the prime necessity for any rapid rise in Soviet living standards: a loosening of the suffocating central controls on what and how much is produced and at what prices. In the interview, he declined even to repeat the sharp criticism of past failures in economic planning that he has voiced inside the Soviet Union. That may merely reflect well-advised caution by a leader who has seen past efforts at reform, notably Andropov's, sabotaged by the bureaucracy. For all his decisiveness, Gorbachev is the head of what really is a collective leadership, not a Stalinist dictatorship. His reluctance to take on the planners may also reflect a concern that economic decentralization implies an easing of political controls, which Gorbachev does not intend or feels he cannot risk at this point.

In foreign policy, too, Gorbachev has been sending out mixed signals. He knows the world outside the U.S.S.R. better than nearly any of his predecessors did on coming to power. Even in his Stavropol days Gorbachev made official trips to Italy, West Germany, Belgium and France, a rare honor for a young provincial Soviet administrator. As a Politburo member, he led Soviet delegations to Canada in 1983 and Britain in 1984 and submitted to sometimes hostile questioning by members of the Parliaments of both countries. Gorbachev on those occasions showed flashes of a quick temper. When a British Tory asked him about religious freedom in the U.S.S.R., Gorbachev testily replied, "You persecute entire communities . . . You govern your society. You leave us to govern ours." But on the whole he impressed his hosts as one Soviet official who could discuss touchy issues in a businesslike fashion.

Gorbachev appears to tailor his messages carefully to the particular foreign audience he is trying to reach. He has spared little effort in wooing India, a nonaligned but friendly country. When Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi visited Moscow in May, Gorbachev appeared in person at the door of Gandhi's Kremlin apartment ten minutes before they were to begin talks in another part of the Kremlin. He threw an arm around Gandhi and said, "Spring is here. I suggest we skip the limousines and walk to our meeting. You and I can take care of the protocol boys." The two later signed economic agreements providing an immediate Soviet credit of $1.2 billion to India and paving the way for scientific and technical cooperation through the year 2000.

In dealing with some other Third World leaders, Gorbachev has shown the iron teeth rather than the broad smile. He told Pakistan's Zia ul-Haq that continued Pakistani assistance to guerrillas battling Soviet troops in Afghanistan would affect relations with the U.S.S.R. "in the most negative way." Said Zia: "Gorbachev was twisting my arm." Zia did not yield.

Gorbachev's signals to non-Soviet Communists have been similarly varied. To leaders of the Italian Communist Party, who regularly proclaim independence from the Kremlin and in pre-Gorbachev days were just as regularly denounced for it by Moscow, the message seems to be that all is forgiven. Gorbachev reportedly has told two prominent Italian Communists who met separately and privately with him on visits to Moscow that he recognizes their right to hold an independent view of how to apply Marxist precepts in Italy.

Far more important, Gorbachev has been making overtures to Peking about a Soviet-Chinese rapprochement. The Chinese have been polite but suspicious, stressing what they call the "three obstacles" to agreement: the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, Soviet assistance to the Vietnamese occupiers of Kampuchea, and the stationing of as many as 52 Soviet divisions on Chinese borders. Gorbachev has shown no signs of removing any of those obstacles. Says one senior Chinese diplomat: "I think because Gorbachev is more flexible, he will be harder to deal with." His meaning: Gorbachev is likely to combine hard-line positions with just enough concessions on minor matters, and just enough public relations flair, to make those positions appear more reasonable than in the past.

To the leaders of the East European nations formally allied with Moscow, however, Gorbachev's message is clear enough: Toe the line. Todor Zhivkov of Bulgaria last year had scheduled a trip to Western Europe in the interest of fostering closer relations with non-Communist countries. He abruptly canceled those plans after Gorbachev, acting for the ailing Chernenko, hurriedly visited the Bulgarian capital, Sofia, in December to confer with Zhivkov and, presumably, communicate Soviet displeasure. In dealing with the West, and the U.S. specifically, Gorbachev has not altered the line pursued by his predecessors in any substantive way. He has, however, taken a different approach to the atmospherics of the superpower relationship, going out of his way to preach detente. To many in the West, his prime effort appears to be detaching West European allies from the U.S. by making superficially attractive offers.

Not all have been adroit. Over the Easter weekend, Gorbachev proposed that the Soviet Union and the U.S. immediately stop deployment of intermediate- range nuclear weapons in Europe. The ploy was too transparent to work. The Soviets had essentially completed their missile buildup, and the U.S. was in the midst of countervailing emplacements; a freeze would have left the U.S.S.R. with a huge lead in warheads. Even the Dutch government, which earlier had waffled on accepting American missiles, turned down the idea.

Other Gorbachev ideas, however, such as the proposals for moratoriums on nuclear and antisatellite tests, might be more tempting to Europeans. For that matter, some arms-control advocates in the U.S. think they might be worth at least exploring. Be that as it may, Gorbachev's potential for promoting disunity in the alliance clearly worries British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. When the Soviet leader visited London last year, she declared, "I like Mr. Gorbachev. We can do business together." But in a Washington speech in July, Thatcher warned of a "massive Soviet propaganda offensive" offering "the alluring prospect of large reductions in nuclear weapons, of a stable peace just around the corner, if only the United States were to give up SDI (Star Wars), if only Britain and France were to abandon their nuclear deterrents, if only we were to accept Soviet proposals which would preserve and guarantee Soviet superiority in numbers, if only, in other words, we accept the Soviet view and give up our own."

Gorbachev's true intentions may become clearer after the summit with Reagan in November and the convening of the Communist Party Congress in Moscow on Feb. 25, 1986, the 30th anniversary of Khrushchev's secret speech to the same body denouncing Stalin. In assessing Gorbachev, Western Kremlinologists find points of resemblance to Andropov in his stress on economic reform, to Stalin in his insistence on discipline, to Khrushchev in his penchant for press-the- flesh politicking. But the dissimilarities between Gorbachev and his predecessors are greater still: he is a Soviet leader born long after the Bolshevik Revolution, with no adult memories of World War II, no involvement in Stalin's bloody purges, no strong ties to the Soviet military.

Gorbachev is Gorbachev: an authoritarian with a common touch, a convinced Communist and believer in his country's social and economic system who is nonetheless outspoken in his insistence that the system can and must be made to work better--"a sort of Bolshevik Atari high-tech fan," in the pithy summary of Alexandre Adler, professor of Russian history at the University of Paris. He is a man with the intellect, political skill and force of personality that might have brought him to the top under any political system. ( Above all, he is a leader who can make plans for the year 2000 with a reasonable expectation that he will still be in power to witness their frustration or fruition. Such a leader might conclude, or be persuaded, that the fulfillment of his visions can best be guaranteed by an avoidance of confrontation and a careful management of competition between the Soviet Union and the U.S. If not, he could easily become a supremely dangerous adversary.

With reporting by David Aikman/Washington, Erik Amfitheatrof/Rome and James O. Jackson/ Moscow