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She does have a daughter named Irina, who is a doctor married to another doctor. His first name is Anatoli, but his surname is not known. Raisa has two granddaughters, one named either Oksana or Xenia (probably the latter) and another whose name is undisclosed.
Who is the real Raisa? As with most members of the Soviet elite, the personality behind the public image remains elusive. In Soviet newspapers, she is still not identified by name when photographed with her husband. Yet at least she is pictured. That unprecedented visibility, says Jonathan Sanders, assistant director of Columbia University's Harriman Institute, has come as a "shock to the system." During Stalin's reign, not only were the wives of high officials invisible but also a few were sent to labor camps or forced * into divorce at the dictator's whim. Such practices ended after Stalin's death, but the near total obscurity of the wives of the mighty remained. Gail Lapidus, a professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley, suggests that "by appearing with his wife and allowing her to be seen as an active partner, Mikhail Gorbachev is normalizing and humanizing the image of the leadership in Moscow." In the new age, the General Secretary is allowed to be devoted to both the state and his wife. "He is saying it's time for women to step forward," explains Stephen F. Cohen, professor of politics at Princeton. "They have been asked to do too much and have not gotten their reward." In that sense, Raisa has emerged as an experiment in glasnost.
She is clearly qualified for the role. She graduated from high school with a gold medal for being top student in her class; Mikhail Gorbachev, at another school, came away with only the silver. In the 1950s, both attended Moscow State University and were neighbors in the school's cramped Stromynka Student Hostel. He pursued law. She studied Marxist-Leninist philosophy. He was a country boy, though self-possessed and confident. She was popular, witty and cultured. They met at a ballroom-dancing class, and he quickly set about whittling down her small army of suitors. Mikhail and Raisa were wed in 1954 but did not live together for six months, until married-student housing became available.
After graduation from Moscow State in 1955, Raisa joined Mikhail for what would be a 23-year stint in Stavropol, his home region in the Caucasus. Vladimir Maximov, a Soviet emigre in Paris, recalls Stavropol in the 1950s as an "overgrown village whose life centered entirely on a single street." It was 800 miles from Moscow, and much farther still in terms of sophistication. As Mikhail began his slow climb through the party apparat, Raisa busied herself teaching at a local school ("the best job in the world," she would later say) and, at the same time, worked toward the equivalent of a Ph.D. in sociology, which she received in 1967 from the Moscow State Pedagogical Institute.