Moscow, December 25, 1991

Gorbachev tries to calm Raisa and promises to sort things out right away. Red blotches appear on the president’s cheeks as his fury mounts. He starts making angry calls, cursing and swearing as he demands to speak to the security officials responsible. He eventually gets Colonel Redkoborody on the line. “You’re really out of line and you’d better straighten up,” Gorbachev cries, lacing his words with profanities. “You’re talking about somebody’s home here. Do I have to report all this to the press? Please, what are you doing? Stop this madness.”

Redkoborody blusters and promises to talk to the security men. He blames excessive zeal at lower levels but at the same time mentions he has orders from higher up. Yeltsin’s chief bodyguard, Alexander Korzhakov, later discloses that the command came directly from his boss, who ordered him to mount a campaign of daily harassment of Gorbachev’s staff at the dacha so he could move in right away. Korzhakov sees his task as making life difficult for the Gorbachevs but finds that they are not in any rush to leave.

Gorbachev’s anger has some effect. After his heated conversation with Redkoborody, he is given more time to evacuate the dacha. But Yeltsin’s security men have also arrived at the Gorbachevs’ state apartment in Lenin Hills, where they are now rummaging around and removing their personal effects. “Everything had to be done in a rush,” Gorbachev complains, after finding the mess the next day. “We were forced to move to different lodgings within twenty-four hours. I saw the results in the morning—heaps of clothes, books, dishes, folders, newspapers, letters, and God knows what lying strewn on the floor.”

Yeltsin has as little respect for Raisa’s feelings as he has for Gorbachev’s. Raisa was hostile to him from the start, he believes, and this played a role in her husband’s attitude towards him. Yeltsin was among the first to criticize Raisa’s high profile as Gorbachev’s wife, complaining that “she unfortunately is unaware how keenly and jealously millions of Soviet people follow her appearances in the media.” When he began highlighting Gorbachev’s privileges as Communist Party chief, Yeltsin blamed Raisa for encouraging his expensive tastes. “He likes to live well, in comfort and luxury,” he noted. “In this he is helped by his wife.” Yeltsin once tackled Gorbachev to his face at a Politburo meeting about Raisa’s “interference.” ³ This impertinence deepened the rift between them.

Slight and always elegantly dressed, Raisa is admired and envied by members of the Russian intelligentsia, and by quite a few ordinary Russians, as the first Soviet leader’s wife to show a sophisticated and humanizing face to the world.⁴ She swept away the image of politburo wives as tongue-tied women whose qualification, it was said, was to be heavier than their husbands. Anatoly Sobchak’s wife, Lyudmila, thought that while she lectured people like a schoolteacher, Raisa was “the first woman who dared to violate the Asiatic custom where the wife sits at home and doesn’t show her face.”⁵ Chernyaev thought she made the Gorbachevs look like “normal people” in the West. Gorbachev would say in later years that taking his educated, energetic wife with him on trips was a second revolution in addition to perestroika.

No leader’s spouse had played a public role in Soviet life before, except Lenin’s wife, Krupskaya, who was a revolutionary and a member of the Politburo in her own right. Yeltsin trumpeted to aides that Raisa had no business going with Gorbachev on foreign trips and playing a high-profile role on the international stage. When U.S. ambassador Jack Matlock inquired of the Russian leader if he intended bringing Naina on a trip to the United States, he retorted, “No. Absolutely not! I’ll not have her acting like Raisa Maximovna!” It might be acceptable in a rich, prosperous, and contented society but “not in our country, at least not at this time.” Gorbachev had caused a rumpus years earlier when he told NBC’s Tom Brokaw that he discussed everything, including national affairs at the highest level, with his wife. As far as Yeltsin was concerned, Raisa’s influence had an adverse effect on Gorbachev’s attitude towards people, towards staff appointments, and towards politics in general, and that she was “standoffish and [put] on airs.”