Graceful and slim as a willow branch, with the bearing of a girl from the high intelligentsia, Raisa Maximovna Titorenko left a gaggle of gaping men wherever she walked. "She had an exceptionally beautiful figure, Russian-style," says Mikhail Gorbachev's college roommate, Rudolph Koltchanov. These awkward boys tried every ploy to win her, but Raisa cut them down with a cold stare.
It was at a ballroom-dancing class that Gorbachev first laid eyes on her. He was teasing his awkward friends from the safe remove of the doorway when Raisa started to dance with a man named Tapilin, a gawky giant who pitched forward like a giraffe. Big tall Tapilin and little tiny Raisa - Gorbachev laughed aloud at the ludicrous sight. "Let me dance with your partner," he insisted.Raisa was tiny, silken-skinned, elegant in her speech and polished in her dancing. "He fell for Raisa right away," says Koltchanov, and walked about numb for weeks until she showed a response. "He always loved her from the very start. I would visit them in Stavropol in the '60s, and I would see that their love had only grown stronger."
Raisa's background also is a black hole to her countrymen. Owing to her wide cheek span she is believed to have Mongol ancestors. Her name is Ukrainian, but her family moved around, and she was reared mostly in the Altai area of Siberia.
Rumors persist that she is related to an important member of the apparatus, and that is how Gorbachev got his pull. No evidence has been produced to show she is related to Andrei Gromyko. But one of their classmates was told Raisa is related to Maxim Saburov, a member of the Khrushchev-era Politburo.
No one disputes that her father worked for the state railroad. Some describe him as a railroad construction engineer, a position of the highest status during the war period.
Other classmates insist that Raisa's father was only a simple railroad worker. But her brother is a literary writer, and she came to Moscow University already refined in her knowledge of the arts.
The marriage of Raisa and Mikhail was a sterile formality, the signing of books in a registrar's office. What followed, though, was a great bash at the students' residence with dancing and food and drinks and toasts; then everyone stopped to wonder where the newlyweds would spend the night. After some maneuvering, the couple spent the night alone in one of the dormitory rooms, but in the morning they had to go back to separate rooms until the following year, when they obtained a room in the new students' residence in the Lenin Hills.
Many of Gorbachev's classmates went on to become pillars of the Moscow party establishment - members of the Ministry of Justice, the Central Committee, the militia and the KGB. Gorbachev, too, wanted to stay in Moscow, says Dmitri Golovanov, the son of a prominent newspaper editor. Yet despite his cultivation of Moscow's elite and his work for the party bosses, he was still a prisoner of his provincial background. In a runoff election for top leader of the Komsomol within the newly merged law faculties, Gorbachev was beaten by a well-connected Muscovite. The loss dashed his hopes of launching a political career in the capital.
He was in for another rude awakening when he went to the Moscow prosecutor's office to apply for work. "I don't have any apartments," he told Gorbachev. "You come from Stavropol; you should think about going back where you came from."
Stavropol was a sleepy, rude and dirty place of secondary exile - 1,000 miles south of Moscow - to which lesser members of the nomenklatura and literary free spirits such as Pushkin and Lermontov were banished. It was hard to go back. But Mikhail and Raisa, who was already pregnant, boarded the train for the 24-hour trip south in "hard class."
They awoke to the sight of a one-street town, veiled in dust, where few buildings had indoor plumbing, tap water or gas. The couple rented a tiny, unheated room in a mud-brick hut. With only a kerosene lamp to cook on, even water for tea took 20 minutes to boil. When their baby was born, the landlady took pity on them and suggested they live in her room because it was warmer. Meanwhile, Gorbachev started work as an investigator at the local prosecutor's office. The legal system was a sham. Public prosecutors who tried to be honest were incarcerated. New law graduates either had to enforce the existing system and be corrupted by it or change careers.
Gorbachev saw the truth but locked it away in his memory for the next 25 years while he picked his way through the treacheries of a parasitic aristocracy dependent for its privileges on one man: the non-elected territorial party boss. To his credit, Gorbachev left the prosecutor's office after only a few months. Without a sponsor, he had to start at the bottom. In the Soviet Union, protection is everything, particularly in the blood sport of politics. So Gorbachev set about cultivating and manipulating older men with the power to protect and advance him.
But the single most helpful factor in his success in Stravropol, according to Zdenek Mlynar, a Czech and close friend from Moscow University, was Raisa.
When they returned to Stavropol, Raisa was offered a more prestigious job than her husband. She was young, and she had a university education, a rarity in Stavropol. Her first position was teaching at a medical institute, but the local community college, the Stavropol Agricultural Institute, lured her away by offering her a more generous salary - 1,250 rubles a month - to teach in its philosophy department. Gorbachev, starting in the city Komsomol, was paid considerably less.
From the start, the relationship between Mikhail and Raisa was strikingly different - a partnership between equals. Raisa was even her husband's teacher. He enrolled in her philosophy seminar at the institute, where he also had begun a correspondence course in 1962.
She granted him no privileges. When Gorbachev tried to broaden the discussion to international issues, she would disapprove of his ideas, recalls Gorlov. But he'd come right back and assert his personal view of events.
The fearsome Raisa even faced down the party mind-control inspectors, who would check up on how courses were being taught. One day they secretly tape-recorded Raisa. When she found out, she marched straight to the director of the institute and demanded he summon the inspectors to her classroom.
"She invited the director and vice director and me, too," remembers the chairman of her department, Professor Mikhail Chuguyev. Raisa shook her finger in the faces of the so-called authorities and spat out her scorn. "This is the last time you'll do this!" she admonished. "If you need to check up on me, come and ask. But don't you do it this way. It's not morally acceptable. It's not honest. Do it openly."
Thoroughly chastened, the men apologized: "Raisa Maximovna, we won't do that any more." They left her domain and did not return - until she refused to teach atheism.
"I don't like it; I just don't like to teach atheism and I'm not going to do it any more." Period.
"She wouldn't permit vulgarisms against capitalism or any other system," notes Chuguyev. "She held firmly to the view that only scholarly criticism was acceptable. And she was firm on this point that people should talk and criticize only openly." Thus Raisa was an early practitioner of glasnost.
She would also prove to be a prophet of perestroika. For Raisa Gorbachev had already become a pioneer in the field of sociology, one of the rare people in the Soviet Union who dared to do independent research among the kolkhozniki - the farmers.
She studied the first collective that refused the system of being paid by points and demanded money, daily pay. "Self-accounting" they called it, meaning that only those who worked got paid. While teaching 10 hours a day, this young mother wrote and defended a doctoral dissertation in which she demonstrated how this unorthodox initiative had earned the farmers a higher standard of living and awakened dreams of travel and consumer goods. She then turned her research into a book.
Self-accounting would become a cornerstone of Gorbachev's program for restructuring the economy.
Gorbachev and his wife are a leadership team. During the Washington summit, Raisa stayed in the room with the top officials, perched attentively on a loveseat beside Anatoly Dobrynin, while Gorbachev talked with George Shultz. And last year in Bonn, she sat up with Gorbachev and his brain trust until 2 in the morning, asking questions and making comments as they digested their watershed trip to West Germany.
In a society where one sees a prosperous young husband wipe his nose on his wife's skirt, Raisa Gorbachev is possibly even more threatening than perestroika. Along comes the outspoken Raisa, seizes the opportunity to give cultural lectures on TV - and wears a different outfit every time.
"We women notice things that men don't," a Soviet citizen writes. "She changes clothes several times a day, while we can't even afford to buy a simple dress. Where are the funds coming from to pay for this?"
Arkady Vaxberg, a Moscow journalist whose newspaper is bombarded with such letters, says, "Your man in the street is willing to accept the necessity of her presence abroad, but nobody can understand why she has to follow him all around the country."
Raisa has been trying to soften her public image. Pounced on during her U.S. visit for lunching with Estee Lauder and in Paris for hobnobbing with Yves Saint Laurent, from whom she accepted a silk shawl, she canceled her planned drop-in at Valentino's couture showroom in Rome last autumn and turned up instead to inaugurate an exhibition of "Perestroika in Action."
Castigated by Soviets for wearing a fur coat to visit earthquake victims in Armenia, most of whom had no coat at all, Raisa knew exactly how to dress when she flew to Sicily last November to honor survivors of a terrible earthquake. The town hall of Messina was decked with red poinsettias for the arrival of the Red Queen - in her plain cloth coat.
As Gorbachev told his former girlfriend, Nadezhda Mikhailova, "I always ask advice from Raisa. Before I give a speech, she's my first listener."
He calls Raisa "my general."
NEXT: THE ROAD TO THE TOP
(c) 1990, Gail Sheehy (adapted from an article that first appeared in Vanity Fair)
Distributed by Los Angeles Times Syndicate