Gorbachev--’Pragmatic Visionary’ With Amazing Energy, Confidence

When the familiar face of Mikhail S. Gorbachev disappeared from Soviet television screens and the front pages of the newspapers last summer, it set off wide concern and speculation, here and abroad.

Was the Kremlin chief ill? Was he, as the West German newspaper Bild reported, the victim of an attempted poisoning? Could he be in political difficulty? Or was he just away on his annual vacation, soaking up sunshine in the Crimea?

One of Gorbachev’s chief supporters, Vitaly A. Korotich, the editor of Ogonyok magazine, expressed a commonly held view.

“The last man I want to be ill in this country is Gorbachev,” Korotich told visitors in mid-September. “His personal role in perestroika (the campaign to transform Soviet society) is so great.”

When Gorbachev returned to Moscow from what turned out to be a holiday, looking tanned and a little slimmer, he jokingly complained that foreign correspondents in particular were speculating too much about his health. “They try to bury me,” he said.

Central Role

The episode illustrated what a central role Gorbachev plays in perestroika and the related program of glasnost , or public openness.

With amazing energy and public relations skills, Gorbachev has captured the attention of the world as he negotiates arms control treaties with the United States and simultaneously struggles to revitalize the stagnating Soviet economy.

The spy-thriller writer, John Le Carre, for example, has called Gorbachev “the most interesting figure in international life today.”

Marshall I. Goldman, a professor at Wellesley College and head of the Russian Research Center at Harvard University, described Gorbachev as “probably the strongest, most effective political manipulator . . . since the Bolshevik Revolution.”

Even the CIA, hardly known for its compliments to Kremlin leaders, termed him a “pragmatic visionary.”

Gorbachev exudes self-confidence; but, then, a man with less self-assurance might not have attempted what many in the West regard as an impossible dream.

The 56-year-old Gorbachev, who came to political maturity after the worst days of Josef Stalin’s terror and the trauma of World War II, says he had no choice except to try to remake the Soviet Union. Without a revolutionary transformation, he has declared, the Soviet Union would lose its status as a superpower and see its global influence decline.

Gorbachev, a third-generation Communist Party member, has with extraordinary candor blamed the current mess on the party leadership, including himself. But he doesn’t want to reduce the party’s commanding role--only to make the party and the system work better.

He is younger, better educated, far more articulate and better equipped to exploit television than his three immediate predecessors, all sick and elderly men who symbolized the paralysis of the Soviet economic and social system.

Western politicians invariably say that Gorbachev has an inborn air of authority. As former British Defense Secretary Denis Healey has said: “He was frank and flexible with a composure full of inner strength. He was fierce but courteous in arguments.”

At times, however, his air of self-confidence turns into self-righteousness. “How could anyone think ill of the Soviet Union?” he asked quite seriously of Secretary of State George P. Shultz.

On another occasion, speaking of the Soviet leadership, Gorbachev asserted: “It is impossible for us to be irresponsible; we would not allow ourselves to be.”

This is the same man, however, who kept secret for nearly three days the news of the world’s worst nuclear accident at Chernobyl last year and waited for 18 days to address his nation on the causes and consequences of that tragedy.

But Gorbachev also has a self-effacing streak, deploring the praise of sycophants and simplifying the rituals of high office. While he is driven to the Kremlin in an armored Zil limousine, for example, he proceeds through the city without a motorcade or screaming sirens.

Fyodor M. Burlatsky, another adviser who once was part of Nikita S. Khrushchev’s entourage, said Gorbachev has greater self-control--an inner calm--that allows him to make better analyses than his more volatile predecessor.

The Gorbachev phenomenon is more remarkable considering his peasant origins in the village of Privol’noye, in the Stavropol area of the northern Caucasus.

Born on March 2, 1931, when Stalin’s drastic collectivization of farming was near its climax, the young Gorbachev was the grandson of the chairman of the first collective farm in the village; his grandfather, in fact, was briefly jailed during the Stalinist purges of the 1930s. His father was a machine operator before the war, later becoming an economist and local Communist Party official. The elder Gorbachev died in 1974.

Gorbachev was still in primary school when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in June, 1941. German troops occupied Stavropol for five months the following year.

In his remote settlement, however, he may have avoided the rigors of Nazi rule. At any rate, he resumed his schooling in 1943 and put in long hours as a farm worker to replace men who were called to war.

Awarded Medal

In 1949, he and other harvest hands who brought in a bigger-than-expected crop received the Order of the Red Banner of Labor. He applied to join the Communist Party the following year and became a candidate member.

Then, in a highly unusual move, the peasants’ son made a bold decision to apply to the most prestigious institution of higher education in the country--Moscow State University. He was admitted to law school, probably aided by his award and his party ties.

At the university’s historic buildings, within a stone’s throw of the Kremlin, Gorbachev shared a room with a Czech student, Zdenek Mlynar, who later rose rapidly in the ranks of the Czechoslovakian Communist Party.

Mlynar, who was a champion of reform during the “Prague Spring” of 1968, emigrated to Austria in 1977. He has written about the student life he shared with Gorbachev, indicating that the young man from Privol’noye had never known a foreigner before their meeting.

Zhores Medvedev, who has written a biography of Gorbachev, said the association with the young Czech influenced him as much as a prolonged stay in a foreign country would have.

“If Gorbachev has become ‘Westernized’ in his appearance, manners, dress and the image he projects of tolerance and cordial behavior--all the small signs which mark him as different from the usual Komsomol and party boss--it was probably Mlynar’s doing,” he wrote.

After graduating, Gorbachev served 22 years as a party official in Stavropol, rising rapidly through the ranks. His first jobs were with the Young Communist League, or Komsomol, a traditional training ground for party officials.

By 1970, when he was 39, Gorbachev was first secretary of the Stavropol territory party committee and one of the youngest provincial party chiefs in the Soviet Union. In that post, he reorganized the area’s vast, productive grain farms, expanded the size of private plots and allowed the collectives a greater voice in planning.

His innovations were soon recognized and rewarded in Moscow. He joined the party’s powerful Central Committee in 1971 and eventually chaired the youth affairs commission of the Supreme Soviet, the nation’s formal legislative body.

He found powerful mentors in Mikhail A. Suslov, a former Stavropol party chief who served as Leonid I. Brezhnev’s ideologist in the Politburo, and KGB Chairman Yuri V. Andropov. In 1978, he was brought to Moscow as agriculture secretary on the 10-member Secretariat of the Central Committee. Membership on the Politburo, the Central Committee’s policy-making organ, followed the next year; he became the youngest member of the Politburo.

Part of Gorbachev’s appeal for Westerners is the prominence of his wife, Raisa, in his travels abroad as well as his trips inside the Soviet Union. Unlike the wives of previous Soviet leaders, who were rarely seen in public, the fashion-conscious Raisa has been the center of attention overseas.

They met when both were students at Moscow University, where she was studying philosophy and Marxism-Leninism. Raisa went on to become a teacher and later won her candidate’s degree, equivalent to a doctorate in the West, by preparing a thesis on rural life in the Stavropol region.

The Gorbachevs have one child, Irina, 31, a doctor. She is married to a doctor, and they have a daughter, Oksana, about 5 years old, who is her grandfather’s darling.

Gorbachev, however, spends little time with his family. He is known as a workaholic who routinely puts in 12-hour days and works weekends as well, saving only Sunday morning for his granddaughter. Asked what he did in his spare time, he barked: “We don’t have any . . . not just me but the entire leadership.”

In fact, he has followed so swift a pace that some aides worry that physical exhaustion is the greatest threat to perestroika. In one nine-day period last spring, for example, he made nine public appearances, took a three-day trip of 1,200 miles to the Soviet space center at Baikonur and greeted two foreign heads of government.

Clearly, Gorbachev is a man in a hurry. He often drums his fingers on a desk, revealing his impatience.

To expedite his programs, he has, in rapid-fire order, dropped five rivals from the Politburo, promoted eight like-minded colleagues and replaced two-thirds of all government ministers.

Still, for Gorbachev, success, or even partial success, remains elusive.

And, demanding urgent measures from party and government officials, Gorbachev has voiced his disappointment.

“We cannot live on hope alone,” he said recently. “If we fail to tackle urgent tasks, those which affect the everyday life of the nation, people will not understand us.”

A Western diplomat in Moscow who sympathizes with Gorbachev’s aspirations said, “It’s much harder than he thought, and I think he now knows this.”