I WAS born in the Stavropol region of the North Caucasus, one that had witnessed countless invasions and been a crossing point of many and varied cultures and civilisations. My home region schooled me early in tolerance and respect for other nationalities, languages, customs and religions. Village life and that of my peasant family were closely bound up with nature 鈥� and thus also unavoidably with having to pull together to survive natural disasters and the effects of social injustices.
As a child I lived in poverty, in a traditional cabin with an earth floor. We slept on top of the Russian stove, and in winter a calf and in spring hens and ducks were kept under the same roof. In 1933, while I was still a child, Stavropol suffered a famine which was described in neighbouring Ukraine as 鈥減lanned starvation鈥�. In that terrible year nearly half the population of my native village, Privolnoye, starved to death, including two sisters and one brother of my father.
Another trial followed the famine: the Stalinist purges. Both my grandfathers were arrested on trumped-up charges, but fortunately they survived. But my wife Raissa鈥檚 grandfather was shot and not rehabilitated until 1988. Then, in 1941, a terrible tragedy struck the Soviet people: the attack by Hitler鈥檚 Germany. My father was sent to the front while together with the rest of the family my mother and I, still only a young boy, lived through the German occupation, the hunger, the constant worry about my father and depressing concern for the fate of our country.
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It was the following episode more than anything else which forever shaped my abhorrence of war. In late February or early March 1943, just as the snow was beginning to melt, I set off with a few other lads to hunt for 鈥渢rophies鈥� in the undergrowth between Privolnoye and the neighbouring village of Belaya Glina. We happened on the remains of a group of our soldiers who had fallen in battle: decomposing bodies in shreds of uniform, half devoured by wild animals, skulls in rusty helmets, bleached bones of arms and hands still clutching rifles, empty eye-sockets staring at us. This face of war, this image, so surrealistic in its realism, will remain in my memory forever.
The natural disasters visited on our country in the post-war years showed me how dependent we are on nature. In 1946 almost the whole of the harvest in our region, and indeed in nearly all grain-growing areas, was ruined by drought. The higher I rose on the career ladder the more I saw before me the picture of the economic, social and ecological crisis for which the Soviet Union was heading. No care was being given to the earth, the fount of our existence; it was exhausted and laid waste. The state gave precedence to heavy industry, which worked mainly for all aspects of armaments manufacture, and to the mining of our mineral wealth, the sale of which was financing the arms race.
In 1985 I was elected chairman of the Communist party, which meant I became head of state of the USSR. By that time I had already developed a number of ideas for reforming the country. Those ideas were supported by my firm conviction concisely summarised in the words: 鈥淲e cannot go on like this!鈥�
