Raisa Gorbachev

FOR six and a half years, Raisa Gorbachev was one of the most influential—and mythologised—women in the world. Did she use her influence well? On balance, yes, but certainly not in the way that she intended. She meant to help her husband Mikhail to modernise and humanise the Communist superpower. Instead, she helped destroy it. Glamorous as she seemed, mainly to people outside Russia, in the end she was one of the final tragic figures of the disastrous 74-year-long experiment.

She was also widely misunderstood, particularly in the West, where she was painted as a sort of New Deal Democrat, while in Russia she was unfairly detested. Until the last few months, when people began to admire the way she and her husband so patently loved each other in adversity, she was most often regarded just as a pushy and privileged provincial apparatchik's wife on the make.

She was born Raisa Titorenko, in a Siberian backwater, the surname suggesting Ukrainian roots. Her father worked on the railways. Both grandparents, it was revealed near the end of Mr Gorbachev's reign, were “repressed” under Stalin; one died in a labour camp. Nonetheless, for all but the last decade of her adult life, Raisa set out to be the model Soviet woman, who strove to “perfect” the system that had been set up by Lenin and Stalin.

She met Mikhail, another star student whose rural background was even humbler than hers, at Moscow University in 1951, two years before Stalin died. A devout Marxist-Leninist, she did even better in philosophy than he did in law. In 1955, two years after getting married, they went back to his home region, where he spent the next 23 years climbing up the party ladder until he became the provincial boss. She taught Marxism, then did sociological research into collective-farmers' lives.

Daringly modern

She was as ambitious as he was. Together they cultivated, as a crucial mentor, Yuri Andropov, the long-time head of the KGB, who probably helped Mr Gorbachev win his first big Moscow job, as a farming honcho, in 1978. When the KGB boss became the Soviet Union's leader (1982-84), Mr Gorbachev moved up another notch. Raisa first hit the international headlines when she accompanied Mr Gorbachev, as a likely next leader, to London in 1984. When Mr Andropov had died, nobody outside Russia's ruling circle even knew if he had a wife at all. The Gorbachevs daringly decided that Raisa would be part of a modern-looking, western-style duo.

The ploy worked—abroad, at any rate. The pair were brighter, bouncier, more open-minded, more outgoing, more attractive than anything the Soviet Union had, at that level, previously produced. Raisa was pretty, intelligent, unabashed. She wore fancy (though Soviet-made) clothes. Mr Gorbachev acknowledged her advisory role, calling her “my general”, and breezily admitting (though this was censored for Soviet readers) that he “discussed everything” with her.

Though—unusually, even for rising party people—the couple had made a private trip through France and Italy in the 1970s, they were not, in fact, as worldly-wise as many westerners presumed. As “first lady”, Raisa did not, in fact, have an American Express card; bills run up abroad were simply sent to the embassy. On one western visit, well into her time as leader's wife, she had to have the idea of a housing mortgage explained to her.

At first, like most of the few Soviet citizens who were allowed abroad, she was prickly, didactic and eager to portray the Soviet Union as superior to the West. Indeed, she is never known to have publicly disavowed the basic rightness of Lenin's cause, which, in philosophical terms, she probably espoused even more firmly than her husband did. But as she grew more confident in international circles, she relaxed and charmed many of those she met with her sparkle.

But after about mid-1989, glasnost (which neither she nor Mr Gorbachev had then ever thought, in their worst nightmares, might lead to the ending of the Communist Party's monopoly of power), took on a momentum of its own, and things began to spin out of control. The Gorbachevs were reviled by the Communist old guard, yet won no sympathy at all from the new liberals. Some of their most trusted friends backed the abortive late-Bolshevik coup in 1991. The shock of that event (she thought they might be killed) prompted a minor stroke. From 1992 onwards, with the Soviet Union's collapse, they became nobodies; only abroad did adulation continue. The final humiliation, for both Gorbachevs, was his bid for Russia's presidency in 1996: he got 0.51% of votes cast.

Yet, for all that, Mrs Gorbachev deserves an honoured place in history. Presuming, as one must, that she did greatly influence her husband, she earns credit for feeding the humane impulse that made him hold back from unleashing the organs of repression—still very much at his disposal—when the Soviet empire began to unravel from 1989 on. A partnership to the core, neither of them wanted to destroy the creed they had once both passionately believed in. But they had the good sense and decency not to let the place drown in bloodshed when the game was up.