Moscow, December 25, 1991

The masses inevitably resented her celebrity. The Russian women who endured harsh living conditions and had no access to haute couture disliked her as much as the Russian men reared in the domestic tradition of domostroi, the practice dating back to Ivan the Terrible under which husbands dominated and wives obeyed. Her elegance was a reminder of the existence of special shops with luxury clothes that were inaccessible to ordinary citizens. She became the subject of frequent gossip. Gorbachev complained in his memoirs that she supposedly went shopping with an American Express card when they didn’t know what an American Express card was, and that she allegedly spent large sums on fashion to compete with Nancy Reagan when all her clothes were made by seamstress Tamara Makeeva in Moscow. He raged in particular about Yeltsin spreading the “lie” that he and Raisa had use of a gold credit card as a Politburo member. “It was a disgrace to read all this nonsense.”⁹

This story originated in the Western media. On June 6, 1988, Time magazine reported that after admiring Margaret Thatcher’s diamond earrings on a trip to London four years earlier, Raisa “dropped into Cartier on New Bond Street to buy a pair ($1,780) for herself, paying with the American Express card.” Time also claimed she owned four fur coats and wore three of them in one day in Washington, and it made the unlikely allegation that Mikhail Gorbachev was once overheard quipping, “That woman costs me not only a lot of money but also a lot of worry.”

Raisa was deeply offended by the many articles about her in Russia and abroad in which “accuracy was totally absent, and invention, myths and even slander became the ‘basis’ of what was written…. If it had not been for my name appearing in the text I would never have believed they were writing about me.” Gorbachev blamed Western “centers of psychological warfare” out to undermine him and “political riff-raff’ in Russia who stirred up a campaign of innuendo against Raisa to discredit his reforms.

Much was also made in the American media of a cold war between Raisa and Nancy Reagan, wife of President Reagan. The former actress found the Marxist-Leninist lady hard going. “She never stopped talking, or lecturing to be more accurate.” Nancy was taken aback when Raisa “snapped her fingers to summon her KGB guards” to get a different chair. “I couldn’t believe it. I had met first ladies, princesses and queens, but I had never seen anybody act this way.”¹⁰

Raisa developed a much warmer relationship with Barbara Bush, though George Bush had difficulty appreciating her deadpan humor. At a dinner in the Soviet embassy in Washington, the U.S. president joked to Raisa, as they were being entertained by a very overweight and unpretty Russian opera singer, “I think I’m falling in love.” “You’d better not,” she scolded him. “Remember Gary Hart!” Bush concluded that she had been briefed on the scandal surrounding the former senator and presidential candidate and that she was not kidding.¹¹ Bush invited Jane Fonda, Van Cliburn, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Dizzy Gillespie, and other celebrities to a lunch in the White House after the Soviet embassy made it known Raisa wanted to meet stars of show business.

Raisa broke new ground by becoming the first Soviet leader’s wife to engage in charitable work. She notably donated $100,000 in royalties from her husband’s books in 1990 to improve Russia’s treatment of childhood leukemia, and she became an active patron of a children’s hospital in Moscow. But she always maintained a reserve about her private life and endured the negative press in dignified silence. “Why should I talk about myself?” she told family friend Georgy Pryakhin, who was engaged to record a series of conversations with her for a short, sentimental book called I Hope. “I am not a film star or a writer or an artist or a musician or a fashion designer. And I am not a politician…. I am the wife of the head of the Soviet state, supporting my husband as far as I can and helping him as I have always done ever since our young days when we linked our lives together.”¹²

The book has just been published and no doubt has come to the attention of the Russian president, which goes some way to explaining his harsh actions towards her just when her husband is about to resign. Without naming him, she singles out Yeltsin and his acolytes for particular scorn in its pages. They are party men who for thirty years expounded the merits of “barrack-room socialism” and were in charge of building society, and then announced that “they will gladly destroy it all and set about its destruction.” She is scathing about how easily some former comrades have changed their coats and how “yesterday’s energetic propagandist for atheism today vows eternal loyalty to Christian dogmas.”¹³