Word: raisa
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...President would be well taken care of: he would receive a pension of 4,000 rubles a month (roughly $40 at the present exchange rate), the use of two official cars and the services of a staff of 20. In private, overzealous Russian bureaucrats reportedly told Gorbachev's wife Raisa to pack up and vacate the presidential dacha for more modest housing no later than midnight on the day of his resignation...
...Hope, Raisa describes her early years as one of three children of a railroad engineer in Siberia. Money was so tight that she did not own a real overcoat until she went to college. "Everybody remembers the coat," she says. "It really was a milestone in the family history...
...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...
...Mikhail became a Secretary of the Central Committee and the couple moved to Moscow, where Raisa felt very much the outsider among the spoiled communist elite. 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...
...Raisa paints the Soviet leader as a hardworking man who likes to sing and kid his sometimes prissy mate. She acknowledges her unpopularity in her own country and scoffs at the criticism from some quarters that she has put on airs. And she points to continuing threats from both the left and the right. "In the center of this gigantic whirlwind is the person closest to me," she says. "Will we be able to come out of the whirlwind with honor?" There is now some hope...