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Outside class, students led a grim existence. Gorbachev spent the first three of his student years in the shabby Stromynka student hostel, an 18th century former barracks that housed 10,000 young people packed eight or more to a room. There was a kitchen and a washroom on each floor, but no proper bathing facilities. Gorbachev and his roommates would head to a public bathhouse twice a month. They stored their personal belongings in suitcases under the beds. Many of the youths could not even afford tea. Instead, they drank "student tea," a concoction of hot water and sugar. The favorite diversion was foreign movies, most of them captured by the Red Army from German forces and shown in the "culture club" on the main floor. Johnny Weissmuller's Tarzan movies were most popular. After one such epic show, the Stromynka hostel would resound with jungle whoops by the students.
In this maelstrom, Gorbachev somehow found time and privacy for romance. Male and female students lived on the same floors, though they had separate sleeping and bathroom facilities. Gorbachev and his roommates drew up a complicated schedule guaranteeing each of them one hour alone in the room every week to entertain a female guest. On the hall bulletin board, the periods of privacy were discreetly designated "cleaning hours."
One of the women down the hall from Gorbachev was Raisa Maximovna Titorenko, a bright, popular philosophy student a year younger than he. Mlynar recalls that Mikhail initially had a good deal of competition for her attention, but the two eventually began seeing each other regularly. They were married early in 1954. The couple celebrated the occasion modestly with 30 or so other students at a party in the corner of the dormitory eating hall, then went to Gorbachev's room for their wedding night. Gorbachev's roommates had arranged to stay away. The following day, however, they drifted back, and Raisa returned to her room. The couple did not live together until several months later, when they obtained married-student accommodations in the newly completed 34-story main building of Moscow State University.
Though Gorbachev was trained as a lawyer, he has never practiced; his main interest from his earliest days at Moscow State University was politics. Even before leaving Privolnoye, he had joined the Komsomol, the youth league that people ages 14 to 28 pass through in preparation for joining the Communist Party. Armed with a glowing recommendation from the Stavropol committee, he became a Komsomol organizer at the Moscow State University law school in 1952 and simultaneously, at 21, a member of the party proper. He was assigned to a working-class area of Moscow for propaganda activity and the handling of constituents' complaints, while continuing his Komsomol work at the university.