Former Soviet first lady Raisa Gorbachev, seen here in a 1999 file photo, died from leukemia in Germany early Monday. (Reuters)

By J. Y. Smith
Special to The Washington Post
Monday, September 20, 1999; 12:01 p.m. EDT

Raisa Gorbachev, 67, whose stylish, forceful, and glamorous performance as the wife of the last Soviet leader, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, made her a lightning rod for attacks on her husband's programs of economic and political reform, died yesterday of leukemia at University Hospital in Muenster, Germany.

Mikhail S. Gorbachev led the Soviet Union from 1985 to 1991, first as general secretary of the Communist Party and then as the president of the Soviet Union. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990, survived an attempted coup by communist conservatives in 1991 and resigned the presidency at the end of that year when the Soviet Union voted itself out of existence.

Mrs. Gorbachev was a presence in her husband's life in a way that was unprecedented in the Soviet experience. She appeared with him in public at home and abroad, served as his eyes and ears on her travels and was one of his closest advisers. Her activities were readily accepted in the West, but they were the subject of much criticism in the Soviet Union.

She was practiced in diplomacy, but she created a minor furor in 1987 during a summit between Gorbachev and President Ronald Reagan. After touring the White House with First Lady Nancy Reagan, she described it as "an official house. I would say that humanly speaking, a human being would like to live in a regular house. This is like a museum."

Mrs. Reagan was furious. In "My Turn," her memoir, she said, "It wasn't a very polite answer, especially from somebody who hadn't even seen the private living quarters!"

Mrs. Reagan also said Mrs. Gorbachev was given to lecturing rather than carrying on a conversation. The alleged chill between the two first ladies was widely reported in the press, but by all accounts they put their differences behind them.

In any case, it was a long way from Mrs. Gorbachev's humble origins. She was born Raisa Maksimova Titorenky on Jan. 5, 1932, in the village of Rubtsovsk, Siberia. She grew up in various parts of the Soviet Union where her father was employed as a railroad engineer.

She was a brilliant student and graduated from high school at the head of her class and with the coveted Gold Medal. This got her into the elite Moscow State University, where she studied philosophy. It was there that she met her future husband, a law student and the child of peasants. They were married in 1954. They were so poor that they had to borrow a pair of white shoes from a friend to complete her bridal outfit.

The following year, they moved to Stavropol, a provincial capital in the Caucasus, Gorbachev's native region. Mikhail Gorbachev began his climb through the bureaucracies of the communist party and the Soviet state.

Mrs. Gorbachev earned a doctorate in sociology from the Lenin Pedagogical Institute in Moscow, having written a thesis called "The Emergence of New Characteristics in the Daily Life of Collective Farm Peasantry (Based on Sociological Investigation in Stavropol Territory)." She taught at the Stavropol Agricultural Institute.

In 1978, the couple returned to Moscow. He entered the inner sanctum of Kremlin power. She joined the faculty of their alma mater. In 1985, she gave up teaching to become an unpaid member of his staff.

"I am very lucky with Mikhail," she told an interviewer. "We are really friends, or if you prefer, we have great complicity."

The Gorbachevs were beneficiaries of the Soviet system, but they were also keenly aware of the stagnation and contradictions that were such a prominent part of daily life. Moreover, their families had first-hand experience of the terror visited on the country by Josef Stalin – a grandfather of each had disappeared into the Gulag during purges in the 1930s.

They fit naturally into the "sixties generation," which struggled to carry forward the efforts, began by former premier Nikita S. Khrushchev in the late 1950s, to shake off the Stalinist legacy of oppression and cruelty.

"We were bound first by our marriage, but also by our common views of life," Mikhail Gorbachev wrote in his memoirs. "We both preached the principle of equality."

When they reached the pinnacle of power, these attitudes brought them into conflict with two powerful forces. The first was the conservative wing of the Soviet communist party, determined to defend its position and privileges against reform.

The second and perhaps greater force was "domostroi," the traditional and rigidly patriarchal code of Russian behavior in which women are rarely seen and almost never heard. It proved to be all but impervious to the "vanguard doctrine" of Marxism-Leninism.

To start with, as Mikhail Gorbachev observed in his memoirs, Soviet society "did not have a tradition of according the first lady a special status." No wife of a previous Soviet leader, not even Nadezhda Krupskaya, the formidable and aggressively ideological wife of Vladimir Lenin, the founder of the Soviet State, had sought to function as a first lady in the modern sense.

Mrs. Gorbachev had many supporters as she found her own way, but there were raised eyebrows in one quarter or another about almost everything she did. Some of the criticism was personal, but much of it came from opponents of perestroika (economic reform) and glasnost (openness), the centerpieces of Gorbachev's policies.

There were questions about activities that have been accepted as a matter of course for First Ladies in the West, such as accompanying her husband abroad and appearing with him in public at home. Once when she called her husband's attention to a child during a meeting with ordinary citizens in a street, many Soviets were scandalized: a wife does not direct her husband in any way, particularly in public.

Although Mikhail Gorbachev never identified his wife as an adviser in public statements in Moscow, it was widely known abroad that he had done so. By his own account, he relied on her observations of conditions she observed in her travels around the Soviet Union.

"She visited the families of workers and the homes of peasants," he wrote in his memoirs. "She went to new and old neighborhoods and got to know how medical institutions, household services, shops operated, how the municipal and rural markets worked. This was due both to her natural curiosity and to her professional interest as a sociologist."

She visited victims of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster and worked to see that they were cared for, and she was the sponsor of a major pediatric hospital in the Soviet Union. She was a key figure in Soviet Cultural Foundation, which had contacts with similar organizations in other countries.

Mrs. Gorbachev also represented her husband at occasions he could not attend for political or other reasons. An example was a celebration at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow of the 1,000th anniversary of the introduction of Christianity to Russia, at which she sat in the front row with a number of bishops and church dignitaries.

These activities would be unexceptional for the spouse of a western leader, but they were entirely novel in terms of the previous Soviet experience.

The Gorbachevs were sometimes compared to Nicholas II and Alexandra, the last tsar and tsarina.

In a typical joke, they are in bed and she says: "Misha, how does it feel to sleep with the wife of the leader of the Soviet Union?"

Mrs. Gorbachev's clothes – of a variety, quality and quantity not available to ordinary Soviet citizens – were another source of criticism, as was her manner. She was said to be "imperious."

In 1991, Mrs. Gorbachev published "I Hope," a memoir in the form of a long interview with Georgi Pryakhin, a Soviet journalist. She had always resisted suggestions that she write about herself, she said, but decided to do it after visiting commencement exercises at Wellesley College at the invitation of First Lady Barbara Bush. The students bombarded her with questions, she wrote, and "That finally changed my mind."

Her purpose, she said, was to correct "invention, myths and even slander" that had been written about her.

Once Gorbachev left office, Mrs. Gorbachev was active in cultural affairs and traveled widely with her husband.

In addition to her husband, survivors include a daughter, Irina.