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Gorbachev was already preparing himself for national leadership. While still in charge of farming, he gathered Soviet academic experts for a series of seminars held sometimes in the Central Committee offices, sometimes in a dacha outside Moscow. The sessions started with problems of agriculture but quickly developed into freewheeling discussions of what was wrong with the economy in general and how it might be fixed. Among the participants were Economist Abel Aganbegyan, who had been urging decentralization and a wider role for market incentives since the mid-1960s, and Tatyana Zaslavskaya, a leading sociologist. Zaslavskaya recalls one encounter with Gorbachev: "I sat next to him. It is incredible what power and drive emanate from him. One feels as if it were a strong field of energy. His vitality is extraordinary, and yet, although you feel this tension, he is a good listener and waits for you to finish."
The rising Kremlin star got a firsthand look at how far the Soviet economy had fallen behind the West's. When Gorbachev joined the national hierarchy, he was already well traveled by comparison with such other Soviet leaders as Andropov, who never set foot outside the Communist world, and Suslov, who reportedly once told a visa applicant that he saw no reason why anyone would want to journey beyond the U.S.S.R.
As a Politburo member, Gorbachev in 1983 headed a Soviet agricultural delegation on a visit to Canada and spent ten days poking around farms, processing plants and supermarkets. At one cattle ranch, he asked to see "some of the workers." The rancher replied that there were none; he ran the spread of several hundred acres with only his family and a handful of day laborers. A Canadian host who speaks Russian heard Gorbachev mutter under his breath, "We are not going to see this ((in the Soviet Union)) for another 50 years." Eugene Whelan, then Minister of Agriculture and Gorbachev's official host, was surprised on another occasion to hear the Soviet leader comment about the invasion of Afghanistan: "It was a mistake." (He was later to call Afghanistan a "bleeding wound," but in public he still justifies the invasion.) In the same year, however, Gorbachev served on a Politburo crisis- management subgroup that sought to justify the Soviet downing of a Korean Air Lines passenger jet by asserting that the plane had been on a spying mission for the U.S.
By the time a fatal kidney ailment cut short Andropov's tenure in early 1984, Gorbachev was already a candidate to succeed his former mentor. At Andropov's funeral, Gorbachev made a telling gesture of his closeness to the late General Secretary: he was the only Politburo member publicly to console Andropov's bereaved widow Tatyana. But the Old Guard made a final stand, choosing Chernenko instead. Gorbachev went along, and even agreed to make the nominating speech. He probably knew his turn would come soon enough. Ailing and 72, Chernenko was not going to last long. In fact, through much of his year in power Chernenko was so ill that Gorbachev, his principal deputy, in effect ran the country.