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Yet Gorbachev is clearly sensitive to opinion at home. When Soviet television broadcast his interview with NBC's Tom Brokaw last year, a question on whether Gorbachev discussed "Soviet affairs at the highest level" with his wife was deleted. The General Secretary's answer ("We discuss everything") was cut as well. In Washington last year she spontaneously crossed the street to talk to Western journalists, underlining a Gorbachevian openness; her KGB bodyguards promptly ordered the only Soviet journalist in the press group to leave.
Which Raisa will appear at the summit, the vivacious woman who chats up Western reporters abroad or the more modest one who stays in the background on her husband's tours of Soviet factories and collective farms? At a time when Gorbachev's reform efforts are still facing opposition from hard-liners, obstructionist bureaucrats and skeptical workers, the General Secretary is likely to tread softly. But he has not given up on pushing his wife forward, perhaps to demonstrate in the most personal terms that he is intent on improving the lot of women. Since 1987, for example, she has been a director of the Culture Fund, a potentially influential body in charge of historical preservation and one that is independent of the Ministry of Culture.
In spite of her academic achievements, many of Raisa's fellow citizens perceive her as having risen to prominence not so much through merit as through marriage, something of a throwback in an egalitarian society like the Soviet Union. "Raisa Maximovna ought to be more modest," says a young village woman. "If we knew she was a help to her husband on these trips and didn't just go along to enjoy herself, our whole impression of her would be different." Adds Luda Yevsukova, a Soviet emigre in Washington: "She's a normal woman who married well. She gets nice clothes, she travels to the West. She gets everything, her people get nothing. She'll never be popular, because of all her privileges."
One of Raisa's disadvantages is the lack of precedent. Lenin's wife Nadezhda Krupskaya was similarly well educated and strong willed. But she was a prominent revolutionary before she married and never played the part of First Lady. Contemporary examples elsewhere in the Communist world are uninspiring: in Rumania Nicolae Ceausescu's widely reviled wife Elena; in China the disgraced Jiang Qing, Mao Zedong's widow. Leonid Brezhnev's daughter Galina, once hailed as the East bloc's answer to Jacqueline Kennedy, later achieved notoriety by associating with shady characters.
Convincing Soviet citizens that Raisa will be different may be difficult. She is not about to play the dutiful housewife, puttering contentedly around the Gorbachev dacha alongside Rublevskoye Highway west of Moscow. In her doctoral dissertation she recorded these words from a cossack folk song: "Go play, young girl, while you are still free." Raisa will have her fun. And if Soviet public opinion or the exigencies of domestic politics force her to curb her activities at home, she will always be a hit on the road. All she has to do is switch on her strobe-light smile and, as she has so often before, drop one of the handful of phrases she knows in English: "See you later, alligator."