Word: gorbachevized
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Raisa Gorbachev has not been seen in public since Aug. 22, when, looking haggard and pale, she walked down the steps of the plane that carried her and her family back to Moscow after 72 hours of house arrest in the Crimea. But last week the world did get a chance to read what the 59-year-old wife of Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev had to say about her ordeal and, in a newly released memoir, about her earlier foreboding of what lay ahead...
...first learned of the putsch at about 5 p.m. on Sunday, Aug. 18, when an agitated Gorbachev told her that a group of men had arrived from Moscow to see him and that all the phone lines were dead, including the "red phone" that links the President to the Minister of Defense. The whole family quickly agreed they would stick by the President at all costs. "This was a very serious decision," Raisa told Trud. "We know our history." This may have been a reference to the Bolsheviks' grisly execution of the last Russian Czar, Nicholas II, and his family...
...Gorbachev anticipated the threat from communist hard-liners as early as August 1990, during a vacation in Yalta. It was then, Raisa recalls, that her husband told her, "We've got the most difficult time ahead of us. There is going to be political fighting . . . it's very alarming . . . ((But)) we mustn't give in to the conservatives . . . We mustn't surrender the fate of the country to cowboys. They would ruin everything...
Materially, life at Moscow State University was not much better; the Soviet First Lady admits she economized by beating fares on the subway and trams. But romantically, her world blossomed. She speaks poignantly of meeting Mikhail Gorbachev at a student dance and of their love, which deepened on long walks and ice-skating dates in Sokolniki Park. Soon after marrying in 1953, the Gorbachevs moved to Mikhail's birthplace of Stavropol, where Raisa taught college and her husband began his climb through the party ranks...
...Once, at a gathering at a state dacha, she warned the children not to break the chandelier. "I was told: 'Not to worry. It's government property, it can be written off.' " By March 10, 1985, the night before he was chosen to replace Konstantin Chernenko as General Secretary, Gorbachev was so frustrated with the party's self-satisfied sclerosis that he told his wife, "((The country)) just can't go on like this." Despite her commitment to her husband's reforms, Raisa admits that so far perestroika "has given us much and very little...