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^ The contradictions in his personality are enough to raise a question: Who exactly is Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev? It is not an easy question to answer: unhappily, glasnost does not yet extend to the life of its author. One reason, no doubt, is his wariness about encouraging a "cult of personality" -- the euphemism for glorification of an all-powerful leader, which reached sickening heights under Joseph Stalin in Gorbachev's student days and is thus associated in Soviet minds with Stalin's terror. Gorbachev has reacted to incipient hagiography in the Soviet press by being tight-lipped about his private life. Subordinates take their cue from the boss. A high official mentioned to a group of foreigners recently that he had known the General Secretary as a university student. "What was Gorbachev like in those days?" the man was asked. He paused reflectively, smiled and said, "I don't remember."
Gorbachev's official biography is little more than a bare-bones list of Communist Party offices held, and it lacks some of the most elementary information. For example, it is not known for certain whether he has any siblings. Some Soviets say he has a brother who works in agriculture, but no one seems to know the man's name or age. Reports of a sister cannot be confirmed.
From a variety of sources, however, TIME has pieced together a detailed, though still incomplete, picture of Gorbachev's early days and his rise to command. The story begins in Privolnoye, a farming village (pop. 3,000) in the south of the Russian republic, 124 miles from the city of Stavropol. A one- story brick cottage with a small kitchen, three rooms and a pleasant garden plot still stands there: Gorbachev was born in that house on March 2, 1931.
It was a time of bloodshed and terror. Stalin's drive to force Soviet peasants into collective farms was at its height. Those who resisted were deported or shot. Peasants destroyed animals rather than let them be confiscated by the collectives. That slaughter, along with the Soviet government's oppressive requisitions of grain from the newly formed collective farms, created a man-made famine that was raging when Gorbachev was born. Millions eventually died.
The Gorbachev family probably avoided the worst of the suffering: it was on the winning side. Mikhail's grandfather Andrei helped organize the Khleborob (bread producer) collective farm in the year of Gorbachev's birth. Andrei's son Sergei drove a combine for a nearby government machine-tractor station. $ But Mikhail could hardly have helped hearing tales of the disruption that continued during his infancy. As General Secretary, Gorbachev has defended the collectivization and even the repression of the kulaks (well-off peasants), who were deported or executed as class enemies. But perhaps because of boyhood memories, he has criticized the brutality shown to a less prosperous group, the so-called middle peasants. A classmate remembers that as a college student after Stalin's death, Gorbachev spoke of a middle-peasant relative who had been arrested and, the classmate assumes, shot.