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Was Gorbachev getting restless with provincial posts? Perhaps. Mlynar, who was rising toward the top levels of the Czech Communist Party, visited his old classmate in 1967 and recalls that Gorbachev complained about excessive interference by Moscow in local affairs. Mlynar described the sweeping reforms that Alexander Dubcek was then beginning in Czechoslovakia. He remembers Gorbachev saying, with a sigh, "Perhaps there are possibilities in Czechoslovakia because conditions are different." The Czech reforms, however, were crushed by Soviet tanks the following year, and Mlynar went into exile; he now lives in Austria. The two old friends talked and drank through that afternoon and deep into the night. When they finally returned to Gorbachev's apartment, much the worse for wear, Raisa was furious.
Just how Gorbachev rose out of provincial obscurity is still somewhat mysterious. As late as 1978, few outside Stavropol Krai had ever heard of him. The best answer seems to be that he attracted a number of powerful patrons. The first was Fyodor Kulakov, who as party boss in Stavropol first spotted Gorbachev as having great promise. After Kulakov became Agriculture Secretary for the entire Soviet Union, Gorbachev eventually succeeded him in Stavropol -- and Kulakov apparently made sure his protege became known in Moscow. In 1977 the "Ipatovsky method," a new technique of harvesting grain quickly by using flying squads of combines, was judged a smashing success. The idea was probably Kulakov's, but it was first tried in the district of Ipatovsky, in Stavropol Krai, under Gorbachev's supervision. The young regional politician was accorded the honor of an interview on the front page of Pravda, his first taste of national publicity.
Geography gave Gorbachev a mighty assist too. Christian Schmidt-Hauer, a West German journalist and biographer, observes that if Gorbachev had been party chief in, say, Murmansk in the far north, he would never have become General Secretary. But in Stavropol Krai, he was on hand to welcome top Moscow officials who came to the local spas at Mineralnye Vody and Kislovodsk for vacations and medical treatment. They found their host unusual in several respects. Says Soviet Historian Roy Medvedev: "A regional party first secretary who was intelligent and congenial would have been considered untypical. If Gorbachev had yelled, sworn, been a heavy drinker or a high liver with a rest house outside of town where officials could be entertained by pretty waitresses, that would have been considered normal behavior."
Gorbachev was not like that at all. He was a quiet and pleasant host with a reputation throughout the district for incorruptibility. Writer Maximov relates a story about a mutual friend, a poet, who asked Gorbachev as a young Komsomol official to help him buy a Volga sedan. Gorbachev obligingly used his influence to speed delivery. The poet promptly sold the car on the black market and returned to ask Gorbachev for help in buying another. Says Maximov: "Gorbachev did not usually lose his temper, but on that occasion he started shouting and threw the poet out of his office, ordering him never to show his face there again."