It is morning in Moscow, and a conspicuously important visitor, his face half hidden by a fedora, walks into one of the city's factories. He strides up to a worker and introduces himself: "I'm Mikhail Gorbachev."
"Oh!" the worker replies. "I didn't recognize you without your wife."
Not since Czar Nicholas wed Alexandra in 1894 have Russians encountered a ruler's wife with such presence, such personality, such promise as a subject of mild jokes and elevated eyebrows as Raisa Gorbachev. She is the first spouse of a Soviet leader to weigh less than he does, acid tongues have it in Moscow, and the first "Czarina," as some of her fellow citizens mock her, to appear in the Kremlin since the fall of the Romanovs. She is also the first Soviet First Lady to use an American Express card and, as a member of the board of the Culture Fund, the first since Lenin's wife to hold a prominent public position. Her frosty intellect, sharp tongue and relatively lavish habits are the talk of Moscow. Almost from the day in 1985 when her husband took over as General Secretary of the Communist Party, Raisa Gorbachev has been one of the most visible, most gossiped-about females in the country.
What a change! For decades, while Soviet leaders went about the business of state, their spouses remained virtually invisible. The wives of Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev and Chernenko rarely appeared in public. It was not known for sure that Yuri Andropov even had a wife until she showed up to mourn him at his 1984 funeral.
Now, suddenly, there is Mikhail and Raisa, a pair who can hold their own in the international journalistic sweepstakes vis-a-vis Ron and Nancy and, given the Gorbachevs' comparative youth (he is 57, she 56) and the Soviet political system, who will probably outlast George and Barbara or Mike and Kitty. The Western press trembles with anticipation.
Raisa. Even in this semienlightened age, prominent women are somehow reduced to first names: Maggie, Cory, Nancy. Yet, despite her visibility, Raisa Gorbachev remains a riddle inside an enigma wrapped in sable. Is she the witty, cosmopolitan muse of glasnost, as some Westerners who have met her suggest? Or is she a hard-line ideologue, as others report? At a dinner with ^ the Reagans during the 1985 Geneva summit, Raisa launched into a lengthy and pedantic monologue on Soviet policy. After the Gorbachevs left, Nancy Reagan may have spoken for the other guests when she fumed, within hearing of then White House Chief of Staff Donald Regan, "Who does that dame think she is?"
There seem to be several Raisas. Most prominent these days is the "Nemesis of Nancy." The First Ladies' little cold war has been the stuff of tabloid headlines ever since Mrs. Gorbachev upstaged Mrs. Reagan by arriving unexpectedly at the 1986 Reykjavik summit (Nancy stayed home). "I missed you in Reykjavik," Raisa said when the two met in Washington last December. Nancy replied icily, "I was told women weren't invited."