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The choice was unconventional. Law in those Stalinist days had no prestige; it was even despised by many Soviets. The task of a lawyer was to find rationalizations for the state to crush its opponents. Nonetheless, Gorbachev's classes did expose him to a wider range of ideas than he would have encountered pursuing a science curriculum. Like all other Soviet students, Gorbachev was drilled in Marxism-Leninism, and learned minute details about the life of Stalin. But as a law student he took classes in the history of political ideas and studied the works of Thomas Aquinas, Hobbes, Locke and Machiavelli. Gorbachev also studied Latin. Several classes were taught by professors who had somehow managed to survive from prerevolutionary days.
When he began his studies, the adulation of Stalin, "the greatest genius of all times and peoples," was at its height, and the earnest young provincial was not immune to it. "He, like everyone else at the time, was a Stalinist," says Zdenek Mlynar, a Czech who studied law at Moscow State University and later became a top party official in his homeland. But Gorbachev displayed a streak of hardheaded realism about Soviet life. He and Mlynar once watched a propaganda movie, Cossacks of the Kuban, picturing happy peasants at tables groaning with food. "It's not like that at all," grumbled Gorbachev, who remembered hunger in his home region. Mlynar adds that "when we were studying collective-farm law, Gorbachev explained to me how insignificant collective- farm legislation was in day-to-day life and how important, on the other hand, was brute force, which alone secured working discipline on the collective farms."
Fridrikh Neznansky, another fellow law student and now a Soviet emigre, recalls that Gorbachev even then displayed a veneration for Lenin going well beyond what was demanded of Soviet students. He was especially impressed, Neznansky says, by Lenin's doctrine of "one step forward, two steps back" -- in other words, the ability to maneuver and to retreat if necessary while pursuing a goal. Tactical flexibility has been a hallmark of Gorbachev's career ever since. "In politics and ideology, we are seeking to revive the spirit of Leninism," Gorbachev writes in his recently published book, Perestroika. "Many decades of being mesmerized by dogma, by a rule-book approach, have had their effect. Today we want to introduce a genuinely creative spirit into our theoretical work." The first faint glimmerings of glasnost might also be discerned in Gorbachev's law-school attitudes. Mlynar remembers that students were taught to regard anyone who dissented from the Stalinist line as a criminal. Gorbachev, however, remarked to his Czech classmate: "But Lenin did not order the arrest of Martov ((leader of the Mensheviks, a socialist splinter group)). He allowed him to leave the country."