The Gorbachevs' love for each other prevailed through his heady six-year regime and its often rocky aftermath, right up to Raisa's death on Sept. 20, five days shy of the couple's 46th wedding anniversary. With Mikhail beside her at the University Hospital in Münster, Germany, Raisa, 67, succumbed to acute myeloid leukemia; an infection had delayed a bone marrow transplant from her sister Lyudmila, 61.
After Raisa entered the hospital on July 25, her husband put his schedule of seminars and symposia on hold to be with his beloved "Raya." One week before her death, he told PEOPLE how each day she grilled their only child, Irina, 42: "What is your father eating? How is he dressed?" Laughing, his eyes moist, Gorbachev, 68, added, "I don't care at all about how I'm dressed, but it is very pleasant to see that she is still acting the way I have known her for so many years."
Most people remembered a more cosmopolitan Raisa. "She showed a surprised world that a Russian woman could be tactful, charming and elegant," says Georgy Shakhnazarov, Mikhail's former advisor. Yet the woman who smashed the babushka stereotype was hardly a slave to fashion. "You have to understand, she was forced to use our services," says Tamara Makeyeva, 70, who designed most of Raisa's outfits. "It was obvious that she would rather buy ready-made stuff."
Born in the Russian town of Rubtsovsk in 1932, the oldest of three children, Raisa excelled in school, though her father, a railway worker, moved the family often. At Moscow State University, she majored in philosophy and a law student named Gorbachev. "In our student club, I saw Raisa, and that's how it all started," Gorbachev recalls. They loved to waltz and polka together, and in 1953 they married.
Though she taught college-level Marxist and Leninist doctrine, Raisa put her husband's career first as he rose through the Communist Party ranks. The Russian people gave her few points for such devotion. After Gorbachev took power in 1985, Raisa quickly came to be viewed as a jet-setting elitist who wielded undue influence over the reformist president. Stung by the criticism, "she built a wall around herself," says Olga Beklemishcheva, a Russian parliamentarian. Raisa suffered a minor stroke when the Gorbachevs were placed under house arrest during a 1991 coup attempt and, says Galkin, "was always prone to sickness afterward."
Public sentiment toward Raisa softened only after she was diagnosed with leukemia in July. "People have reacted in such a heartfelt way," said Gorbachev. Perhaps they were touched by the irony: Raisa contracted the disease that had been her main charitable cause. After the 1986 nuclear disaster at Chernobyl, she raised $8 million through the nonprofit Gorbachev Foundation for juvenile leukemia treatment.
But no interest rivaled her passion for Mikhail. She waited eagerly for him to return home so they could stroll arm-in-arm, discussing his day. "Everything else in her life took a back seat," says Galkin. Her dedication was repaid. Says George Matthews, who chairs the Gorbachev Foundation's U.S. board: "She was his whole life."
Jill Smolowe
Karen Nickel Anhalt in Munster and Valeria Korchagina and Juliet Butler in Moscow
- Contributors:
- Karen Nickel Anhalt,
- Valeria Korchagina,
- Juliet Butler.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
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