It was Mr. Gorbachev’s task as the local party leader to greet the dignitaries at the train, take them to their dachas, entertain them and escort them back to the railroad station for their return to Moscow. One ailing leader followed another: Premier Alexei N. Kosygin, with a heart condition; Yuri V. Andropov, head of the K.G.B. and briefly premier, with a chronic kidney problem; Mikhail A. Suslov, the party ideologist, who latched on to Mr. Gorbachev as a young counterweight to the aging clique surrounding the supreme leader, Leonid I. Brezhnev.
Mr. Suslov and Mr. Andropov became powerful patrons of Mr. Gorbachev, as did Fyodor D. Kulakov, who was installed in the Politburo in 1971 and put in charge of agriculture. When Mr. Kulakov, who was seen as a possible successor to Mr. Brezhnev, died in 1978, Mr. Gorbachev was chosen to deliver the funeral oration. It was his first speech in Red Square, and the first time television viewers saw the man with the distinctive strawberry birthmark on his forehead.
Returning to Stavropol, Mr. Gorbachev was on hand to welcome Mr. Brezhnev and Konstantin U. Chernenko, a high-ranking Politburo member. Mr. Andropov, who was resting at a nearby spa, also came to greet them. It was a remarkable moment in Soviet history. As a Time magazine biography noted, “There on the narrow platform stood four men who would rule the Soviet Union in succession: Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko and Gorbachev.”
The meeting was apparently enough to convince Mr. Brezhnev that Mr. Gorbachev was the man to take over the agriculture portfolio for the Central Committee. His opinion may have been fortified by Mr. Gorbachev’s admiring critique of Mr. Brezhnev’s recently ghostwritten memoir, “Little Land.” In his book “Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire,” David Remnick quoted Mr. Gorbachev as writing, “Communists and all the workers of Stavropol express limitless gratitude to Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev for this literary work of deep philosophical penetration.”
It was the stilted language of a party hack. But beneath it, seemingly in hiding, was a reformist zeal.
There was much to reform when the Gorbachevs arrived back in Moscow in 1978 from their long sojourn in the provinces. Hardly any effort had been made to conceal rampant official corruption. Mr. Brezhnev was old and ailing. His relatives were under investigation for shady dealings. The bureaucracy was bloated. Wages were low; people stood in lines at stores when they were supposed to be working, often finding nothing to buy. “They pretend to pay us,” the slogan went, “and we pretend to work.”
