Word: raisa
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...RAISA GORBACHEV'S apparent nervous breakdown did not surprise top Soviet analysts. The normally vigorous First Lady was showing signs of tension when she accompanied her husband to the London economic summit in July. Drawing aside Barbara Bush, Raisa confided her worries about Mikhail's political future, even hinting that she feared for his life. Soviet officials in Europe report that she became hysterical several times during her Crimean captivity, and speculate that she has suffered a stroke and a heart attack...
...reports of his illness that he made four videotapes of himself (he did not say how he got hold of a camera) to prove he was not sick at all. Fearing that the worst might happen to him, he also recorded his last will and testament. Gorbachev's wife Raisa was apparently quite shaken by the experience. She was later reported to have suffered some paralysis of her left hand and was said to be receiving medical treatment...
...days after his return to Moscow, Gorbachev had seemed out of touch with events. Shocked by his temporary ouster and perhaps distracted by his wife Raisa's poor health, he retreated into the safety of bureaucratic routine. He closed himself away in the Kremlin and used television speeches and a press conference to address his rescuers. Only well down his list did he mention Yeltsin among those to be thanked. The Russian crowds were not impressed. Just beyond the Kremlin wall in Red Square, a sea of marching, flag-waving demonstrators chanted "Yel-tsin! Yel-tsin!" and shouted for Gorbachev...
This statement is followed by a thorough clawing. Raisa Gorbachev is "a cultural and intellectual snob." She is tactless abroad and a hypocrite at home. "Despite all her moralistic lectures," writes Sheehy, "Raisa is known for doing very little to alleviate the cruel conditions that dictate the lives of most of her countrywomen...
Gorbachev comes across as a brilliant bumpkin from cossack country who could not have made it without Raisa, a doctor of Marxist theory and, in the Sheehy version, the real "prophet of perestroika." How two devout party members could have climbed to the top of the Communist apparatus while nurturing heretical ideas is the subject that gives the author her central thesis of how Gorbachev operates...