75 The family’s pain is undeniable. Gorbachev did not speak about it publicly until 1990. Both of his grandfathers were arrested in the 1930s, his paternal grandfather (who joined the kolkhoz only in 1935) spent a year in Siberia, and several relatives died in the collectivization-induced famine. Grandfather Gopkalo, arrested in 1937, was released in 1938 and restored as a party member and as head of the kolkhoz. Raisa Gorbacheva’s maternal grandfather was shot in 1937. See Mikhail Gorbachev,
76 The essay is not mentioned in Gorbachev’s memoirs but came out in a discussion in the Politburo in 1986. Gorbachev told his colleagues (including Yeltsin) that he preferred to have someone else meet with Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, who had defected to the West in 1967, returned to the USSR in 1984, and now sought permission to leave again (which she eventually received). Offended by letters in which she criticized her father, Gorbachev said, “If you ask me, it is necessary to place a high value on Stalin, Stalingrad, et cetera. I myself am from such a family. My uncle wrecked his health [building the kolkhoz]. My mother and her four sisters were from an impoverished family. I received a medal for a composition on the theme, ‘Stalin Is Our Glory, Stalin Is the Delight of Our Youth.’” Politburo transcript for March 20, 1986, in Volkogonov Archive (Project on Cold War Studies, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University), 41. “Stalin Is Our Glory, Stalin Is the Delight of Our Youth” was the title of a prewar song by Matvei Blanter and Aleksei Surkov.
77 Interviewed by a journalist in 2000 (see http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/gor0int-1), Gorbachev recalled that “the party’s slogans appealed to me, they made quite an impression on me. It was very seductive, very attractive, and I took it all on faith.”
78 Molchanov interview.
79 Arnold M. Ludwig,
80 Yel’tsin,
81 Quotations from Yel’tsin,
CHAPTER THREE
1 A mining institute opened in Molotov (Perm) in 1953 and was upgraded to a polytechnic in 1960. According to a passage in Yeltsin’s first memoir book not printed in the Russian edition, he saw the new campus of Moscow State University on the Lenin Hills while on his first visit to Moscow in the summer of 1953, shortly after Gulag laborers completed it. He was taken by the magnificence of the buildings and regretted that he had not applied for admission in 1949. But then he thought to himself he probably would have failed the entrance test and, as the Russian proverb goes, “Better a sparrow in the hand than a blue titmouse in the sky.” Nikolai Zen’kovich,
2 Perm was founded in the same year as Yekaterinburg, 1723, but was the only large Russian city other than St. Petersburg to be laid out rectilinearly. It had more cultural and educational institutions than Yekaterinburg and was made capital of the Urals region in 1781. During the revolution and civil war, Perm was more supportive of the White forces.
3 James R. Harris,
4 Leonid Brezhnev,
5 A partial list of evacuated plants may be found at http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/faculty/harrison/vpk/history/part1/list.txt .
6 Sheila Fitzpatrick, “A Closed City and Its Secret Archives: Notes on a Journey to the Urals,”
