Word: raisa
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
...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...
...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...
Among TIME's 31 million readers worldwide is an influential, highly educated professional woman who would be a valuable addition to any magazine's demographic profile: Raisa Maximovna Gorbachev, the focus of this week's cover stories on Soviet women. During the Washington summit last December, Mrs. Gorbachev spotted TIME Correspondent Nancy Traver, who spent 3 1/2 years as a journalist in Moscow and who speaks Russian, at a meeting in the Soviet embassy that was closed to the press. Mrs. Gorbachev took her hand, pulled her alongside and said there was nothing wrong with having an American reporter...