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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.