‘Misha’ Gorbachev--a Poor Boy With No Shoes for School

Little “Misha” Gorbachev’s family was so poor during World War II that the future leader of the Soviet Union missed three months of school because they couldn’t afford to buy him decent shoes, his mother revealed.

Maria Gorbachev’s portrayal of her family’s hardship was contained in a revealing, Soviet-made documentary broadcast by Polish state-run television during Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s recent visit to Poland.

The 47-minute program raised the veil on Gorbachev’s personal life higher than anything shown in the Soviet Union, where the media generally avoid mention of unofficial activities of the leadership.

The television program, narrated by a Polish announcer with Russian comments translated into Polish, consisted largely of clips of Gorbachev’s public appearances and offered a generally flattering portrait of the Soviet leader and his vision of perestroika, or restructuring.

Wartime Hardships

Most revealing, however, was the glimpse into Gorbachev’s peasant upbringing and the hardships imposed by World War II, reminders of which dot the Soviet landscape and consciousness nearly 50 years after the Nazi invasion. Gorbachev was only 14 when the war ended in 1945.

The film showed a war memorial in the Soviet leader’s home district, with six Gorbachevs listed among those who died in combat.

The narrator said that whenever Gorbachev has a chance, he returns to his home village of Privolnoye in the Stavropol region of southern Russia. His mother still lives there.

The film did not show Gorbachev in the village, which has been closed to foreigners since his rise to power in 1985. A Stavropol artist who painted a picture of the town told a reporter that the house where Gorbachev was born is no longer there.

The film showed Maria Gorbachev, a stout woman in a peasant shawl and with a gold-capped front tooth, sitting beside a simple round wooden table, apparently at her home. It was the first known interview with Gorbachev’s mother. The film gave no indication when it was conducted.

“In 1944, Misha was in fifth grade,” she said, referring to her son by the common nickname for Mikhail. “He couldn’t go to school because he didn’t have shoes.”

‘He Must Study’

She said she received a letter from her husband, Sergei, a soldier at the front, instructing her to “sell whatever you can, but buy shoes for Misha. He must study.”

“I went to the market and sold whatever I could, and with the money I earned, I bought a pair of combat boots for 1,500 rubles (about $25 at the current exchange rate),” she said, “and I took him to school.”

Gorbachev’s mother said the headmaster told her the boy had already missed three months of school and couldn’t catch up with his class. But she quoted young Misha as promising, “I’ll make it up.” She said her son earned his diploma with honors.

Maria Gorbachev said life was difficult after the war but that her son finished seventh grade in Privolnoye and continued his studies in a town about nine miles away.

Sergei Gorbachev returned home, having been wounded in Czechoslovakia and treated in a Polish hospital, according to the film. During his trip to Poland, his son paid a visit to the building in Krakow where his father reportedly was cared for by Roman Catholic nuns who operated a field hospital.

Mikhail, the narrator said, joined his father in the fields, helping operate a combine.

The year 1948 was a good harvest, the film says, and “the Gorbachevs worked day and night in the fields. The father was awarded the Order of Lenin for his work, and the son the Order of the Red Banner of Labor.”

The documentary showed a number of photographs of Gorbachev as a child, including one with his grandparents and others with university student Raisa Titorenko, who later became his wife.

In a section portraying Gorbachev as a world statesman and meeting with President Reagan, the film’s background music switched to Frank Sinatra’s rendition of “My Way,” in an apparent tribute to Gorbachev’s determined drive to reform the Soviet system.