Word: raisa
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
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 postcoup interview, Raisa told the Soviet trade-union newspaper Trud she was so terrified that the plotters would kill her and her family that she suffered speech problems and an "acute bout of hypertension" for which she is still being treated. "Those days were horrible," she said...
...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...
...Raisa told Trud, "I never thought such a thing ((as the coup)) could happen to us." But in her autobiography, I Hope (HarperCollins; $20), completed four months before the failed putsch, the Soviet First Lady says she has long been anxious about the "fierce struggle now going on between loyalty and treachery" in the Soviet Union. In the book, actually an extended interview with Soviet writer Georgi Pryakhin, Raisa discloses for the first time that her grandfather was executed under Stalin, an experience that made her both fearful and contemptuous of apparatchiks who act one way "when...
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...