No woman, including the revolutionaries Alexandra Kollontai and Nadezhda Krupskaya, made a greater impact on Soviet politics than Raisa Gorbachev, who died in Germany, on September 20th, aged 67. She was not elected to any office of state, nor was she ever likely to be, but her influence over her husband, the former President of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, was immense.
Prior to her arrival on the public stage, the only important public engagement the first ladies of the USSR were expected to fulfil was that of walking behind their husbands' coffins at state funerals. After three such funerals in rapid succession, those of Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko, the Gorbachevs arrived in the Kremlin and things changed forever.
As leader of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), traditionally dominated by men, and elderly men at that, Gorbachev stunned the established order by saying that he consulted his wife on major political issues. "I discuss everything with my wife, including Soviet affairs at the highest level", he said in an interview on America's NBC channel.
The politburo was stunned. When the interview was aired on Russian television, that section was excised so that the public would not be scandalised by such a heretical statement. But it did not take long for the public to get the message. Raisa Gorbachev was often pictured near her husband. On high state occasions she was even seen whispering advice in his ear.
The Soviet president began to be regarded in conservative circles as something of an "Alphonse", the Russian term for a man who is dominated by a woman. At first all this was seen as a refreshing change but very quickly the tide turned against the Gorbachevs.
Raisa Gorbachev was believed to have been behind her husband's disastrous anti-alcohol campaign. This led to immense resentment on the part of Russian males who were forced to go to great extremes to get their hands on bottles of their beloved vodka. Absenteeism in factories was initially reduced and productivity marginally increased. But then sugar vanished from the shops. It was being used to make samogon, Russia's version of poteen. With sugar gone, even Moscow's famous Red October Chocolate Factory began to curtail production and Russian women began to ask questions.
They asked questions too about the way Raisa Gorbachev dressed. In the west she was a show stealer, a Russian first lady who not only did not look like a babushka, but who changed her outfits four times a day. And those outfits came not from Moscow's promising designers, but straight from the Paris fashion houses of Pierre Cardin and particularly, Yves Saint-Laurent, for whom she organised a fashion show in Moscow in 1986. There were stories of massive spending sprees on hautecouture. It became known that she possessed a piece of notoriously anti-communist equipment: a credit card. As admiration for Russia's first lady was promoted in the west by the major fashion magazines, her standing at home diminished dramatically.
In this, women took the lead. Raisa Gorbachev's wardrobe, so admired in the west, came to be regarded by the average Russian woman as a symbol of Communist Party privilege. Her influence in getting 40 per cent of the country's health budget devoted to mother-and-child care, and the fact that she virtually wrote the extremely progressive sections on women in her husband's keynote speech to the 27th Congress of the CPSU in 1987 - the crucial year of glasnost and perestroika - all this was quickly forgotten.
Raisa Maximovna Titarenko was born into the family of a humble railway worker in the small Siberian town of Rubtsovsk in 1932. She studied philosophy and sociology in Moscow State University where she met Mikhail Gorbachev, whom she married in 1953. The couple lived at first in the southern Russian city of Stavropol where Gorbachev became communist party chief, and she gave birth to their only child, Irina. They moved to Moscow in 1978 when he was appointed a member of the party secretariat and she became first lady upon her husband's accession to power in 1985.
Only in her latter years did she begin to lose her poor image at home. Her 18-month illness after the abortive hard-line coup in 1991 gained her some sympathy with the Russian public. When her final illness was diagnosed as terminal leukaemia, Russian hearts began to melt towards her. Even President Yeltsin, an implacable and often extremely bitter enemy of the Gorbachevs, had publicly expressed his hope for her recovery.
Raisa Gorbachev: born 1932; died September, 1999