Soviet Union: Raising the Curtain on Raisa

Soviet citizens were startled one day last week when they turned to their morning reading of Pravda. There, on the front page, was a photograph of General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev’s wife Raisa — rare exposure indeed for a Soviet First Lady. Just a day earlier Raisa Gorbachev had been mentioned briefly in a story distributed by the Soviet news agency TASS.

While the stylish Raisa, 51, made headlines in the West last December when she accompanied her husband on a trip to Britain, only recently has she begun to enjoy press coverage at home. Over the past month, the nightly TV news program Vremya has three times run footage of the General Secretary’s wife. Last week, as she played hostess to visiting Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and his wife Sonia, many Soviets seemed more interested in Raisa’s comings and goings than in the political and economic results of conversations between Gandhi and Gorbachev. “Raisa may not be as glamorous as Nancy Reagan,” said one elderly Moscow woman, “but she’s nice looking, she’s well dressed — and she’s ours.”