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Gorbachev did not invent the idea of trying to reinvent communism, but during his formative years in obscurity he certainly learned a lesson about the connection between internal reform and international relations. He had seen Nikita Khrushchev's vigorous cultural thaw of the late 1950s freeze again in the intensified cold war that followed the Cuban missile crisis. Alexei Kosygin, who was Prime Minister until his death in 1980, attempted to reorient heavy industry toward consumer goods, decentralization and profitmaking in the mid-1960s. But, ironically, that program was aborted partly because the Soviet crackdown on "socialism with a human face" in Czechoslovakia triggered a backlash against liberalism in the U.S.S.R. In Poland the creation of Solidarity, the first independent trade union in the Soviet bloc, preceded the advent of Gorbachev by five years. But Lech Walesa was officially considered an outlaw. The notion of Solidarity participating in government, not to mention dominating it, was unthinkable.
The intellectual and biographical origins of Gorbachev's radicalism will probably always be a mystery. In a way, they become more mysterious as time goes on, if only because he becomes more radical. The sweeping changes he has instigated this past year in the U.S.S.R., particularly free expression and democratization, and his transfusion of counterrevolution into Eastern Europe would shock not only the late Andrei Gromyko, who nominated Gorbachev for the general secretaryship in 1985, but the Gorbachev of five years ago as well.
Still, there are clues in his life story. Like the population as a whole, he was much better educated than his predecessors. A graduate of the law faculty of Moscow State University, he is the first Soviet party leader since Lenin to have earned a university degree. He is experienced in weighing evidence and reassessing what Marxists call -- but often do not respect -- "objective reality." His rise in the party began long after Stalin's death, so he is less afflicted than his elders by xenophobia and acceptance of terror as a civic norm. His abilities were recognized by KGB chief Yuri Andropov, who offered him counsel and support. Andropov had been a Central Committee Secretary and, as head of intelligence, had access to a picture of domestic and international affairs undistorted by propaganda. He was able to brief Gorbachev on how swiftly their country was declining.
Like his mentor, Gorbachev could see that the creaking, centrally controlled Soviet system, under the stifling ministrations of bureaucrats, was about to expire. To oil the cogs of a restructured economic machine, he would have to inspire productivity and reclaim for the consumer sector much of the vast resources and brainpower that had been commandeered by the military. And to do that he had to overcome traditional Bolshevik paranoia and reappraise the threat to the Soviet Union from the West. "Security," he wrote in 1987, "can no longer be ensured by military means."