Gorbachev’s Mom Hardly Sees Her Son : She Bakes Her Own Bread, Has New TV and KGB Security

In an unusually revealing article published today, a reporter wrote that Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s 79-year-old mother only recently got a new color television to replace her old black-and-white set, still bakes her own bread and complains that her son never visits.

The newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda reported that the only privilege given to Maria Pantelyevna Gorbachev is the KGB agents who provide security down the road from her small house in the southern Russian village of Privolnoye.

The KGB is there not so much to guard her from the many journalists who find their way to the farming village where Gorbachev was born, as it is to keep ordinary citizens from pestering her with petitions for her son, the newspaper said.

Today’s front-page article, titled “Home of the President,” was complete with an old photograph of a young, plump Gorbachev reclining in a field wearing a jaunty beret.

Gorbachev’s widowed mother, the newspaper said, still does the chores around the house and bakes her own bread, even though a collective farm bakery was built several years ago to feed the village’s 3,000 people.

A new paint job on her house and the color TV that recently replaced the old “Rekord” model black-and-white set “have not cost the state or the party one kopeck,” wrote Komsomolskaya Pravda correspondent O. Shapovalov.

Not long ago, a rumor spread that Mrs. Gorbachev was moving to Moscow and selling her house, the newspaper said.

Residents of Privolnoye were ready to make inquiries about buying her house, but she told Nikolai Dorokhov, her neighbor and secretary of the party organization of the collective farm:

“I have already lived in Moscow. I don’t see my son here and I wouldn’t see him there. He leaves home at 6 a.m. and returns late in the evening. . . . I will not go anywhere.”

Gorbachev last visited his birthplace 3 1/2 years ago, the newspaper reported, and while he was there spent only 40 minutes inside his house and another 40 minutes talking to villagers.

Earlier this week, he met with West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl in nearby Stavropol, where he began his Communist Party work in 1955. But he apparently didn’t visit his mother in Privolnoye.