Gorbachev: My Wife Is a Very Independent Lady

It is morning in Moscow, and a conspicuously important visitor, his face half hidden by a fedora, walks into one of the city’s factories. He strides up to a worker and introduces himself: “I’m Mikhail Gorbachev.”

“Oh!” the worker replies. “I didn’t recognize you without your wife.”

Not since Czar Nicholas wed Alexandra in 1894 have Russians encountered a ruler’s wife with such presence, such personality, such promise as a subject of mild jokes and elevated eyebrows as Raisa Gorbachev. She is the first spouse of a Soviet leader to weigh less than he does, acid tongues have it in Moscow, and the first “Czarina,” as some of her fellow citizens mock her, to appear in the Kremlin since the fall of the Romanovs. She is also the first Soviet First Lady to use an American Express card and, as a member of the board of the Culture Fund, the first since Lenin’s wife to hold a prominent public position. Her frosty intellect, sharp tongue and relatively lavish habits are the talk of Moscow. Almost from the day in 1985 when her husband took over as General Secretary of the Communist Party, Raisa Gorbachev has been one of the most visible, most gossiped-about females in the country.

What a change! For decades, while Soviet leaders went about the business of state, their spouses remained virtually invisible. The wives of Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev and Chernenko rarely appeared in public. It was not known for sure that Yuri Andropov even had a wife until she showed up to mourn him at his 1984 funeral.

Now, suddenly, there is Mikhail and Raisa, a pair who can hold their own in the international journalistic sweepstakes vis-a-vis Ron and Nancy and, given the Gorbachevs’ comparative youth (he is 57, she 56) and the Soviet political system, who will probably outlast George and Barbara or Mike and Kitty. The Western press trembles with anticipation.

Raisa. Even in this semienlightened age, prominent women are somehow reduced to first names: Maggie, Cory, Nancy. Yet, despite her visibility, Raisa Gorbachev remains a riddle inside an enigma wrapped in sable. Is she the witty, cosmopolitan muse of glasnost, as some Westerners who have met her suggest? Or is she a hard-line ideologue, as others report? At a dinner with ^ the Reagans during the 1985 Geneva summit, Raisa launched into a lengthy and pedantic monologue on Soviet policy. After the Gorbachevs left, Nancy Reagan may have spoken for the other guests when she fumed, within hearing of then White House Chief of Staff Donald Regan, “Who does that dame think she is?”

There seem to be several Raisas. Most prominent these days is the “Nemesis of Nancy.” The First Ladies’ little cold war has been the stuff of tabloid headlines ever since Mrs. Gorbachev upstaged Mrs. Reagan by arriving unexpectedly at the 1986 Reykjavik summit (Nancy stayed home). “I missed you in Reykjavik,” Raisa said when the two met in Washington last December. Nancy replied icily, “I was told women weren’t invited.”

At the Washington meeting, the U.S. First Lady was taken aback by her Soviet counterpart’s relentless questioning about historical and cultural minutiae during a tour of the White House. “I’m afraid I’m not much help,” admitted Nancy, who was recovering from breast-cancer surgery and mourning the recent death of her mother. “Their face-off was extraordinary,” said one who saw the pair in action. “They didn’t seem to understand each other.” As a result, Nancy decided to tour Leningrad this week only if Raisa did not come along. Instead, Mrs. Reagan’s official escort will be Soviet President Andrei Gromyko’s wife Lidiya. Perhaps compatibility charts should have been drawn: Raisa, a Capricorn (“overexacting, rigid”), vs. Nancy, a Cancer (“touchy, unforgiving”).

In any case, the American First Lady is ready to launch a counterattack. East Wing scouts have collected photographs of every site where the two women will meet, and Nancy has an eye on every detail — from where to sit to be out of the wind to the color of towels in the powder rooms. It should be a meeting to remember. How will Nancy’s homework compare with Raisa’s recent English lessons? Will Raisa’s hair, which was formerly hennaed in the salon of Moscow’s exclusive International Hotel, match the brilliance of Nancy’s, which is touched up with Clairol’s Moongold and Chestnut? Will the Soviet First Lady return to the gold-lame sandals she wore in London in 1984? Will the American First Lady shock the world by wearing red, her favorite color, in Red Square?

The second popular caricature is “Wrap It Up” Raisa, the Soviet Lorelei Lee who, after admiring British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s diamond earrings on a 1984 trip to London, dropped into Cartier on New Bond Street to buy a pair ($1,780) for herself, paying with the American Express card. In Paris she asked Yves Saint Laurent for a bottle of his perfume Opium ($175 an ounce) and received it free. In London she canceled a visit to the tomb of Karl Marx for a chance to see the crown jewels. She owns four fur coats and wore three of them in one day in Washington. Mikhail Gorbachev was once overheard quipping, “That woman costs me not only a lot of money but also a lot of worry.” Seeing her in several outfits a day, some Soviet women, who often have to line up for food and clothing, are apt to scowl. “It’s so insensitive,” says a Moscow language instructor. “She ought to have more sense.”

Next there is Raisa the Unknown. Considering that she is the wife of the leader of one of the world’s superpowers, there are wide gaps in the public record, at home and abroad, about her early life. Only within the past few years has there been general agreement in the West on Raisa Maximovna Gorbachev’s birth date, Jan. 5, 1932, and that she was born in the Siberian town of Rubtsovsk. Her father was a railroad engineer named Maxim Titorenko. That is about all there is to her official biography.

But speculation abhors a vacuum. Thus there have been reports that she is the niece of Gromyko (not true), that she is of Tatar descent and her actual patronymic is not Maximovna but the rather Asian-sounding Maksudovna (“I am absolutely Russian,” she countered last year), that her father was a prominent official exiled to Siberia by Stalin (unlikely), that she has a brother-in-law who was a minor party official until he somehow embarrassed her husband (unconfirmed).

She does have a daughter named Irina, who is a doctor married to another doctor. His first name is Anatoli, but his surname is not known. Raisa has two granddaughters, one named either Oksana or Xenia (probably the latter) and another whose name is undisclosed.

Who is the real Raisa? As with most members of the Soviet elite, the personality behind the public image remains elusive. In Soviet newspapers, she is still not identified by name when photographed with her husband. Yet at least she is pictured. That unprecedented visibility, says Jonathan Sanders, assistant director of Columbia University’s Harriman Institute, has come as a “shock to the system.” During Stalin’s reign, not only were the wives of high officials invisible but also a few were sent to labor camps or forced * into divorce at the dictator’s whim. Such practices ended after Stalin’s death, but the near total obscurity of the wives of the mighty remained. Gail Lapidus, a professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley, suggests that “by appearing with his wife and allowing her to be seen as an active partner, Mikhail Gorbachev is normalizing and humanizing the image of the leadership in Moscow.” In the new age, the General Secretary is allowed to be devoted to both the state and his wife. “He is saying it’s time for women to step forward,” explains Stephen F. Cohen, professor of politics at Princeton. “They have been asked to do too much and have not gotten their reward.” In that sense, Raisa has emerged as an experiment in glasnost.

She is clearly qualified for the role. She graduated from high school with a gold medal for being top student in her class; Mikhail Gorbachev, at another school, came away with only the silver. In the 1950s, both attended Moscow State University and were neighbors in the school’s cramped Stromynka Student Hostel. He pursued law. She studied Marxist-Leninist philosophy. He was a country boy, though self-possessed and confident. She was popular, witty and cultured. They met at a ballroom-dancing class, and he quickly set about whittling down her small army of suitors. Mikhail and Raisa were wed in 1954 but did not live together for six months, until married-student housing became available.

After graduation from Moscow State in 1955, Raisa joined Mikhail for what would be a 23-year stint in Stavropol, his home region in the Caucasus. Vladimir Maximov, a Soviet emigre in Paris, recalls Stavropol in the 1950s as an “overgrown village whose life centered entirely on a single street.” It was 800 miles from Moscow, and much farther still in terms of sophistication. As Mikhail began his slow climb through the party apparat, Raisa busied herself teaching at a local school (“the best job in the world,” she would later say) and, at the same time, worked toward the equivalent of a Ph.D. in sociology, which she received in 1967 from the Moscow State Pedagogical Institute.

Her doctoral dissertation, on peasant conditions at collective farms in the Stavropol region, paid homage to the benefits brought by the October Revolution but pointed to some shortcomings in Soviet rural life: the poor quality of food and clothing, the nonexistence of domestic plumbing and heating and the almost complete absence of entertainment. Sidney Monas, professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin, describes Raisa’s paper, a synopsis of which is available at the Library of Congress as well as the Lenin Library in Moscow, as “slightly better than average, not altogether unorthodox, but with some distinct liberal tendencies.” She pioneered sociological survey methods at a time when sociology was not considered a proper field of study in the Soviet Union. For example, she found that the lower a peasant’s education level, the more likely he was to own religious icons.

Though the dissertation was mildly contemptuous of peasant piety, Raisa professes tolerance for religion. “I am an atheist,” she told a church group in Iceland in 1986. “But I know the church, and I respect all faiths. It is, after all, a personal matter.” She does not necessarily reject spirituality; that would mean brushing aside much of Russian literature and art, subjects that are dear to her. After her husband’s rise to power, she was said to have been instrumental in the rehabilitation of Nikolai Gumilyov, a poet executed by the Bolsheviks in 1921. Gumilyov’s verses shimmer with images of cathedral domes and crucifixes.

Attractive, cultured and correctly attuned ideologically, Raisa Gorbachev was the model of the modern Soviet woman and an asset to her husband as he entertained Moscow dignitaries vacationing in the spas near Stavropol. Among them was Yuri Andropov, then chief of the KGB, who eventually became Mikhail’s mentor. In 1978 Mikhail Gorbachev was promoted to Party Secretary for Agriculture, and the couple finally returned to Moscow. By 1985 Mikhail was General Secretary of the party and the leader of the Soviet Union. Spotting a photograph of Andropov in Washington last year, Raisa said, “We owe everything to him.”

On her initial trip abroad as First Lady, Raisa jokingly said to Danielle Mitterrand, wife of the French President, “Give me some advice. I’m a beginner at this job.” She learned fast, and quickly became a hit in the West. In Washington, accompanied by Van Cliburn on the piano, she and her husband made White House guests smile by leading the Soviet delegation in a rendition of a sentimental Russian favorite, Moscow Nights.

Raisa’s fashion tastes have received mixed reviews. Parisian critics, for example, have described her as “elegant but not chic.” In fact, she appears to avoid flashy clothes. Much of her wardrobe is prepared by a team of designers led by Tamara Mokeyeva of the “experimental” atelier at the Dom Modeli in Moscow. Soviet clothing factories depend on the shop’s designs to keep track of what’s hot and what’s not. But the cuts and colors remain conservative. According to one report, Mokeyeva has only praise for her First Lady: “She has natural charm. This is not something you can learn.”

In the West, Raisa has earned high marks for her breadth of knowledge. At a private party given by Washington Hostess Pamela Harriman, the widow of Averell Harriman, who was U.S. Ambassador in Moscow from 1943 to 1946, Raisa discussed the U.S. Supreme Court with Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and brought up the inner workings of Congress with Senators Barbara Mikulski and Nancy Kassebaum. However, Mikulski later said that “Mrs. Gorbachev is like an East European professor who speaks in paragraphs. There is no free exchange with her.”

The same trait was observed in early May by Arthur Mitchell, director of the Dance Theater of Harlem, during the company’s Moscow tour. “She’s charming, articulate and bright,” said Mitchell after a 20-minute backstage chat with Raisa. “But you know when she asks a question that she has an opinion of her own and wants to see if you agree with her.”

Her diligence can sometimes be charming. During a visit to Czechoslovakia in 1987, Raisa kept behind Mikhail and conscientiously repeated, “Thank you so much for coming,” as they worked the crowd. In Prague she noticed that the General Secretary was about to overlook a young boy. “Mikhail Sergeyevich,” she said in her high-pitched voice. Her husband turned around, greeted the child and invited him to Moscow. Her thoroughness can be irritating too. At a State Department lunch in Washington, Raisa upset Secretary of State George Shultz by having a brief conversation with each of the 180 people on the receiving line. Lunch was delayed for hours.

If such idiosyncrasies are generally overlooked in the West, her audience at home is more critical. Asked to give their opinion of Raisa Gorbachev, some Soviets roll their eyes and choose their words carefully. “I’m with her because I think women should take a more active role in our society,” says a young woman named Anna in Moscow. “But she must use more common sense. She goes to a factory wearing furs. That’s bad taste. She’s showing off, and it doesn’t help her husband’s public image.”

Others complain that she has no right to act like an official. “She misbehaves,” says a Soviet translator. “She shouldn’t lecture everyone she meets.” Over tea and blini, the women in the dachas of the privileged grumble that she does not know her place, that she is reversing the traditional roles of the sexes. “She’s a shrew,” says one Muscovite. “She wears the pants in the family.”

In a country where husbands usually have the last word on everything, the Gorbachevs appear to enjoy an unusually equal partnership. “I’m very lucky with Mikhail,” Raisa confided to a dinner companion during her 1985 trip to Paris. “We are really friends — or, if you prefer, we have a great rapport.” Mikhail seems to enjoy his wife’s feistiness. After his British publisher asked him last April about the possibility of Raisa’s writing a book, the General Secretary smiled and said, “My wife is a very independent lady. On this occasion, I will act as a messenger boy. She will make up her own mind.”

Yet Gorbachev is clearly sensitive to opinion at home. When Soviet television broadcast his interview with NBC’s Tom Brokaw last year, a question on whether Gorbachev discussed “Soviet affairs at the highest level” with his wife was deleted. The General Secretary’s answer (“We discuss everything”) was cut as well. In Washington last year she spontaneously crossed the street to talk to Western journalists, underlining a Gorbachevian openness; her KGB bodyguards promptly ordered the only Soviet journalist in the press group to leave.

Which Raisa will appear at the summit, the vivacious woman who chats up Western reporters abroad or the more modest one who stays in the background on her husband’s tours of Soviet factories and collective farms? At a time when Gorbachev’s reform efforts are still facing opposition from hard-liners, obstructionist bureaucrats and skeptical workers, the General Secretary is likely to tread softly. But he has not given up on pushing his wife forward, perhaps to demonstrate in the most personal terms that he is intent on improving the lot of women. Since 1987, for example, she has been a director of the Culture Fund, a potentially influential body in charge of historical preservation and one that is independent of the Ministry of Culture.

In spite of her academic achievements, many of Raisa’s fellow citizens perceive her as having risen to prominence not so much through merit as through marriage, something of a throwback in an egalitarian society like the Soviet Union. “Raisa Maximovna ought to be more modest,” says a young village woman. “If we knew she was a help to her husband on these trips and didn’t just go along to enjoy herself, our whole impression of her would be different.” Adds Luda Yevsukova, a Soviet emigre in Washington: “She’s a normal woman who married well. She gets nice clothes, she travels to the West. She gets everything, her people get nothing. She’ll never be popular, because of all her privileges.”

One of Raisa’s disadvantages is the lack of precedent. Lenin’s wife Nadezhda Krupskaya was similarly well educated and strong willed. But she was a prominent revolutionary before she married and never played the part of First Lady. Contemporary examples elsewhere in the Communist world are uninspiring: in Rumania Nicolae Ceausescu’s widely reviled wife Elena; in China the disgraced Jiang Qing, Mao Zedong’s widow. Leonid Brezhnev’s daughter Galina, once hailed as the East bloc’s answer to Jacqueline Kennedy, later achieved notoriety by associating with shady characters.

Convincing Soviet citizens that Raisa will be different may be difficult. She is not about to play the dutiful housewife, puttering contentedly around the Gorbachev dacha alongside Rublevskoye Highway west of Moscow. In her doctoral dissertation she recorded these words from a cossack folk song: “Go play, young girl, while you are still free.” Raisa will have her fun. And if Soviet public opinion or the exigencies of domestic politics force her to curb her activities at home, she will always be a hit on the road. All she has to do is switch on her strobe-light smile and, as she has so often before, drop one of the handful of phrases she knows in English: “See you later, alligator.”