The Rise and Rise of Raisa Gorbachev

Mikhail and Raisa Gorbachev were dining with Margaret and Denis Thatcher during their 1984 visit to Britain, and the talk got around to the working class. In his country, the Soviet leader-to-be asserted, “we are all working class.”

“No, we are not,” his wife objected. “You are a lawyer.” Gorbachev conceded, “Perhaps you are right. Perhaps it is just a sociological term.”

That exchange has never been reported in the Soviet Union, nor was Gorbachev’s confirmation to Tom Brokaw last month that he discussed “Soviet affairs at the highest level” with Raisa. If it were known that Raisa had once contradicted her husband before a foreign leader — well, that could only add to the whispered accusations that Raisa Maximovna Gorbachev, 55, is guilty of conduct unbecoming a Soviet wife. In a land where women have full equality under the law but where a husband has the last word, Raisa has become a widely respected but occasionally resented figure. To a Westerner, that attitude is hard to understand. So what if Raisa dresses stylishly, accompanies her husband on official travels in the Soviet Union and abroad and even makes some appearances on her own? So what if she is involved in public policy to the extent of helping to create a fund to encourage the development of young people in the arts? The problem is that the Soviets are accustomed to leaders’ wives who are retiring to the point of invisibility. The outside world did not even know that Tatyana Andropov existed until she attended her husband’s 1984 funeral. Consequently, to some people Raisa’s high profile seems mildly scandalous. When she accompanied Gorbachev to the 1986 Reykjavik summit with Ronald Reagan (Nancy stayed home), a Soviet Foreign Ministry official griped, “Who chose her to represent the Soviet Union?” A young Moscow professional woman complains that on a Gorbachev visit in September to the port city of Murmansk, Raisa was seen in two different outfits the same day: “That may be O.K. for Paris, but not for Murmansk, where people get meat and butter only once a month.”

Raisa is rarely mentioned by name in the Soviet press. She was born in the Siberian town of Rubtsovsk in Altai Krai, though she told reporters at a parade in Moscow last month that she is “absolutely Russian.” According to her official biography, her father was a railway engineer. Raisa’s chosen profession is teaching. When the newly married Gorbachevs moved to Stavropol in 1955, Raisa found a job at a local school and continued to teach for the next 23 years. When her husband was summoned back to Moscow in 1978 to take charge of Soviet agriculture, Raisa became a lecturer in Marxist-Leninist philosophy at Moscow State University. Though she gave up the post after Gorbachev became General Secretary in 1985, she evidently remains very much the intellectual, accompanying Mikhail to cultural performances and displaying a command of foreign books. During the December summit she told Joyce Carol Oates that she had read the novelist’s book Angel of Light and said it was well liked in the U.S.S.R.

Raisa became something of a pioneer in Soviet sociological research during her Stavropol days. She won the equivalent of a Ph.D. in 1967 with a dissertation on the lives of collective farmers, using methods that were then unconventional in the Soviet Union. She sent out questionnaires that drew more than 3,000 replies and conducted follow-up interviews at five collectives. The work reportedly decried the peasants’ bleak living conditions, as well as their fondness for such religious festivals as Christmas and Easter. That latter attitude evidently endures. Mikhail once observed that “she is the atheist” of the couple. Foreigners who have talked with Raisa describe her as a more dogmatic Marxist than her husband. At least she knows what the working class is — and that she and Mikhail are not members.