Susan Eisenhower, granddaughter of President Dwight Eisenhower, said Friday she will marry an adviser to Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, Roald Z. Sagdeev, a rocket scientist and political reformer.
They will be married in a Feb. 9 civil ceremony in Moscow and then will be "blessed" at a religious ceremony at the U.S. Embassy there, Sagdeev said in a telephone interview from Washington.Sagdeev, a Volga Tatar, said he has "no religious assignment"; Eisenhower is a Protestant.
The couple will maintain two homes, living in Washington with Eisenhower's three school-age children during the fall and spring, and spending summers in Moscow, said Sagdeev, 57. He has two grown children.
They met 21/2 years ago, and the romance blossomed while they collaborated on a book about "survival, how a very thin layer of intellectuals survived through difficult years, through purges," before Gorbachev rose to power in 1985, Sagdeev said.
The first draft of the book is finished, he said.
Eisenhower, 38, was not immediately available for comment on the wedding, which she announced through the Eisenhower World Affairs Institute. She is the daughter of John Eisenhower. Her brother, David, is married to Julie Nixon Eisenhower.
The marriage will be Miss Eisenhower's third, said a friend of the family. Her first husband was London barrister, Alexander Bradshaw, with whom she had one daughter. Her second husband was John Mahon, an attorney in Rochester, N.Y., the father of her two youngest daughters.
Sagdeev is thought to have Gorbachev's ear on a range of scientific issues, and has said that he offered the Soviet leader advice on Star Wars, which Sagdeev opposes.