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Not long after the turmoil over collectivization died down in the mid-1930s, the Soviet Union was hit by the second trauma of Gorbachev's boyhood: the Nazi invasion. Mikhail was eleven years old when German tanks rumbled into nearby Stavropol at the start of what became the Stalingrad campaign. Hitler's troops stayed in the area for almost six months before being driven out by the Red Army. In all probability, though, the Nazis would not have bothered to occupy a village as small as Privolnoye, so Gorbachev seems to have escaped the worst rigors of the war. Only in 1950, when he traveled north to university in Moscow, did he apparently become fully aware of the destruction visited on his homeland. He has said that on that 800-mile train ride, he saw "the ruined Stalingrad, Rostov, Kharkov and Voronezh. And how many such ruined cities there were . . . Everything lay in ruins: hundreds and thousands of cities, towns and villages, factories and mills."
Even earlier, though, the war touched young Mikhail. In Privolnoye, as in thousands of other villages and towns in the U.S.S.R., there is an eternal flame and a monument to those who lost their lives in what Soviets call the Great Patriotic War. The name Gorbachev appears on the memorial seven times, though it is not certain which of his relatives are meant. His father Sergei was conscripted and fought at the front for four years, during which "Misha" (the common Russian nickname for Mikhail) must have spent much time alone with his mother Maria Panteleyevna Gorbachev. In a recent interview on Soviet TV, she recalled that at one period during the war Gorbachev could not go to school for several months because he had no shoes. Sergei wrote home urging Maria Panteleyevna to sell anything she could and buy shoes because "Misha must go to school." Maria Panteleyevna, now well into her 70s and a widow (Sergei died in 1976), continues to live in Privolnoye.
Growing up in a farming village, Gorbachev was introduced early to hard work. As a young boy, he probably accompanied his combine-driver father into the fields. At 14 he was driving a combine himself after school and during the summers. It was a hot and sweaty job in that part of the Soviet Union, where summer temperatures reach well into the 90s, and the combines had no cabins. After a few minutes the driver would be surrounded by a cloud of grain chaff and dust that made breathing difficult. In winter it was so cold that Gorbachev had to wrap himself in straw to keep from freezing. He stood it well enough to be awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labor in 1949, a rare honor for an 18-year-old. The award, his impeccable political credentials -- peasant background, father and grandfather Communist Party members -- and the silver medal he received upon graduation from high school as second in his class all helped him win a place at Moscow State University in the fall of 1950.
Gorbachev was already showing wide-ranging intellectual curiosity. "I cannot even say for which subjects I felt a special interest in school," he told an Italian interviewer much later. "At the outset I wanted to enter the physics faculty ((of Moscow State University)). I liked mathematics a lot, but I also liked history and literature. To this day I can recite by heart poetry that I learned at school." He lacked the entrance requirements to pursue science courses, so he decided to study law.