Gobichov was a relatively little known party man in charge of agriculture. He came quietly, and very few expected him to launch the kind of reforms that he did in the late eighties. Both his grandfathers barely escaped repressions. One was interrogated, one was tortured. The memory of unfairness of starlin's collectivization shaped him almost to a greater degree than the soviet edeology did. To the very end of his life, he thought that socialism with human faite was something that was still a goal and was never reached.