Russian first lady Naina Yeltsin is an unpretentious throwback to the days when Kremlin wives seldom ventured out of the shadows.
Mrs. Yeltsin, who is making her first U.S. visit with her husband Boris, is a far cry from Raisa Gorbachev, the pedantic former Soviet first lady.The 60-year-old Mrs. Yeltsin, an engineer by training, is a no-nonsense dresser who cuts a distinctly plainer and quieter figure than Mrs. Gorbachev, who had a reputation at home as a big spender.
The Russian president told ABC-TV's "20-20" program earlier this year that "In our family, I'm the boss." Mrs. Yeltsin concurred, telling a Dutch magazine her husband "never allows me to mix in his affairs."
A mother of two and grandmother of three, she says family life revolves around Boris. "We want to make his life as easy and as nice as possible," she told the magazine Vrig Nederland.
"I am now a pensioner, and I concentrate on being a mother and grandmother," she said.
From the splendor of Tuesday's arrival ceremony on the White House South Lawn, Mrs. Yeltsin and Barbara Bush were heading uptown to Martha's Table, a soup kitchen in a poor Washington neighborhood, to make sandwiches for the homeless and chat with children.
The first ladies have met twice before, in Moscow last summer before the coup that toppled communism and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, and again Feb. 1 on Yeltsin's fleeting visit to Camp David, Md.
Mrs. Bush "found her charming," said Anna Perez, the first lady's press secretary.
Mrs. Gorbachev, who boasted a Ph.D. in propaganda, seldom passed up a microphone on her U.S. tour and spoke with Mrs. Bush as a commencement speaker at Wellesley College. By contrast, there were no plans for Mrs. Yeltsin to speak in public.
Mrs. Bush will hold a luncheon for Mrs. Yeltsin on Wednesday.
The soup kitchen was one of the first charities that Mrs. Bush visited as first lady. While Bush was still vice president, she dedicated the vans it uses to distribute food each night to street people.