Word: raisa
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...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...
...between ideal and reality is once again visible, as the Soviet Union projects a fresh image to the world in the person of Raisa Gorbachev, the wife of General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev. Intelligent, urbane and outspoken, she leads a fast-paced, glamorous life that is as elusive to most Soviet women as the pomp of the royal family is to most Britons. Hailed abroad as the new Soviet woman, Mrs. Gorbachev is perceived as her country's first female superstar since the days of Alexandra Kollantai and Inessa Armand, both early feminists, and Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin's wife, more than...
...Raisa Gorbachev enjoys opportunities that few Soviet women can imagine. She provides less a role model than a yardstick against which Soviet women measure their lives. "We envy her," says Rimma Raude, 37, an economist who emigrated from Kharkov to the U.S. a year ago. Mrs. Gorbachev's life-style serves both to highlight and deepen women's dissatisfaction, even as the rising expectations spawned by glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) have emboldened some women to speak out about their problems...