Those Days Were Horrible

Raisa Gorbachev describes her fears during the coup -- and discloses new details about her personal life

Raisa Gorbachev has not been seen in public since Aug. 22, when, looking haggard and pale, she walked down the steps of the plane that carried her and her family back to Moscow after 72 hours of house arrest in the Crimea. But last week the world did get a chance to read what the 59-year-old wife of Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev had to say about her ordeal and, in a newly released memoir, about her earlier foreboding of what lay ahead.

In her first postcoup interview, Raisa told the Soviet trade-union newspaper Trud she was so terrified that the plotters...

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