Word: raisa
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...every site where the two women will meet, and Nancy has an eye on every detail -- from where to sit to be out of the wind to the color of towels in the powder rooms. It should be a meeting to remember. How will Nancy's homework compare with Raisa's recent English lessons? Will Raisa's hair, which was formerly hennaed in the salon of Moscow's exclusive International Hotel, match the brilliance of Nancy's, which is touched up with Clairol's Moongold and Chestnut? Will the Soviet First Lady return to the gold-lame sandals she wore...
...second popular caricature is "Wrap It Up" Raisa, the Soviet Lorelei Lee who, after admiring British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's diamond earrings on a 1984 trip to London, dropped into Cartier on New Bond Street to buy a pair ($1,780) for herself, paying with the American Express card. In Paris she asked Yves Saint Laurent for a bottle of his perfume Opium ($175 an ounce) and received it free. In London she canceled a visit to the tomb of Karl Marx for a chance to see the crown jewels. She owns four fur coats and wore three...
Next there is Raisa the Unknown. Considering that she is the wife of the leader of one of the world's superpowers, there are wide gaps in the public record, at home and abroad, about her early life. Only within the past few years has there been general agreement in the West on Raisa Maximovna Gorbachev's birth date, Jan. 5, 1932, and that she was born in the Siberian town of Rubtsovsk. Her father was a railroad engineer named Maxim Titorenko. That is about all there is to her official biography...
...benefits brought by the October Revolution but pointed to some shortcomings in Soviet rural life: the poor quality of food and clothing, the nonexistence of domestic plumbing and heating and the almost complete absence of entertainment. Sidney Monas, professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin, describes Raisa's paper, a synopsis of which is available at the Library of Congress as well as the Lenin Library in Moscow, as "slightly better than average, not altogether unorthodox, but with some distinct liberal tendencies." She pioneered sociological survey methods at a time when sociology was not considered a proper...
Though the dissertation was mildly contemptuous of peasant piety, Raisa professes tolerance for religion. "I am an atheist," she told a church group in Iceland in 1986. "But I know the church, and I respect all faiths. It is, after all, a personal matter." She does not necessarily reject spirituality; that would mean brushing aside much of Russian literature and art, subjects that are dear to her. After her husband's rise to power, she was said to have been instrumental in the rehabilitation of Nikolai Gumilyov, a poet executed by the Bolsheviks in 1921. Gumilyov's verses shimmer with...