Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, July 20, 1990                   TAG: 9007200357
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: BRIAN FRIEDMAN ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: MOSCOW                                LENGTH: Medium

CHEER UP. GORBACHEV DOESN'T VISIT HIS MON, EITHER

In an unusually revealing story about the family of a Soviet leader, the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda reported Thursday that the only privilege given to Maria Pantelyevna Gorbachev is the KGB agents who provide security down the road from her small house in the southern Russian village of Privolnoye.

The KGB is there not so much to guard her from the many journalists who find their way to the farming village where Gorbachev was born, but to keep ordinary citizens from pestering her with petitions for her son, the newspaper said.

Although the Western media have reported on Gorbachev's roots and his family, such things are new to Soviet readers. Until recently, the private lives of Communist Party leaders and their families rarely appeared in the state-run media, but under Gorbachev's policy of greater openness, or glasnost, many restrictions have been lifted.

Thursday's front-page article, titled "Home of the President," was complete with an old photograph of a young, plump Gorbachev reclining in a field wearing a jaunty beret.

Gorbachev's widowed mother, the newspaper said, still does the chores around the house and bakes her own bread, even though a collective farm bakery was built several years ago to feed the village's 3,000 people.

A new paint job on her house and the color TV that recently replaced the old "Rekord" model black-and-white set "have not cost the state or the party one kopeck," wrote the Komsomolskaya Pravda correspondent.

Not long ago, a rumor spread that Gorbachev's mother was moving to Moscow and selling her house, the newspaper said.

Residents of Privolnoye were ready to make inquiries about buying her house, but she told Nikolai Dorokhov, her neighbor and secretary of the party organization of the collective farm:

"I have already lived in Moscow. I don't see my son here and I wouldn't see him there. He leaves home at 6 a.m. and returns late in the evening. . . . I will not go anywhere."

Gorbachev last visited his birthplace 3 1/2 years ago, the newspaper reported, and while he was there spent only 40 minutes inside his house and another 40 minutes talking to villagers.

Earlier this week, he met with West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl in nearby Stavropol, where he began his Communist Party work in 1955. But he apparently didn't visit his mother in Privolnoye.

Alla Georgievna Zavalikhina, ideology secretary of the party committee in nearby Krasnogvardeisky, usually accompanies journalists who visit Privolnoye, and complained to the newspaper about the manners of Soviet reporters.

"Foreign correspondents are more tactful. At least no one who was warned beforehand tried to get into her house," Zavalikhina said.

"It's more difficult to explain to ours. One Soviet TV crew wanted to interview her for a popular show by any means," she added.

"Isn't it clear that it isn't decent to bother an elderly woman, even if this woman is not the president's mother?"

The newspaper reported that although there is a small Gorbachev display at the party offices in Stavropol, Privolnoye has no museums or plaques to mark its historic significance - by presidential request.

All this is to the chagrin of Venyamin A. Lutsenko, director of a small party museum in Krasnogvardeisky, 12 miles away. He told the newspaper he'd really like to have the pen that Gorbachev and former President Reagan used in 1987 to sign the treaty to destroy medium-range nuclear weapons.

Thus, the only monument in Privolnoye is the roadblock manned by the KGB agents who, according to the newspaper, tell citizens trying to pass along their petitions to use the mailbox.