Tanned Gorbachev back in view

Press, 19 September 1986, Page 6

Tanned Gorbachev back in view

NZPA-Reuter Moscow The Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, in wisecracking mood for his first public appearance in almost a month, called on his fellow countrymen yesterday to speak their mind and forget old habits of covering up failings.

Mr Gorbachev, looking bronzed and fit, was speaking to farmers in the Krasnodar region of southern Russia during an extensive tour of the grain-growing and dairy farming area, a 15-minute report of which was shown on Moscow television.

“I’m straight from holiday, and I’m still in seaside mood,” he told one

group of mainly women collective farmers, his jacket thrown back over his shoulder as his audience crowded round. And in the style he has established in several walkabout visits to provincial centres since becoming Communist Party general secretary in March, 1985, he urged the farmworkers to tell him about their problems. “We want people in our country to say what they think, to discuss things in a business-like way and find solutions,” said Mr Gorbachev, who comes from the neighbouring Stavropol farming region.

He apparently arrived in Krasnodar from the Black Sea coast, where,

Soviet sources said, he had been spending his holiday since August 20 in at least two resorts. In contrast to recent walkabouts he was not accompanied by his wife, Raisa. Earlier yesterday the Helsinki newspaper, “Hufvudstadsbladet,” cited reports from “Western business circles” that said the couple could have been the targets for an armed assault and that both may have been injured, Mrs Gorbachev more seriously. Although similar rumours have circulated among foreigners in Moscow, diplomats said there was no sign that anything dramatic may have happened in the Mr Gorba-

chev’s entourage. During the rule of Leonid Brezhnev, from 1964 to 1982, and of his predecessor, Nikita Khrushchev, from 1953 to 1964, there were occasional bursts of rumours of assassination attempts but only one, against Mr Brezhnev in 1968, was officially acknowledged. Asked by reporters yesterday about the report as carried in the Finnish newspaper, one Soviet official said, “We don’t comment on rumours.” As seen on television yesterday, plainclothes security men closely watched the crowds during Mr. Gorbachev’s tour, but the surveillance did not seem to be especially more intensive than Usual.