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Raisa Gorbachev, Wife Of Mikhail Gorbachev, Dies Of Leukemia
September 20, 1999
MOSCOW (AP) — Raisa Gorbachev, wife of the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, died Monday after a battle with leukemia, said hospital officials in Germany. She was 67.

Mrs. Gorbachev died in Muenster, Germany, on Monday morning, said Jutta Resing, spokeswoman for University Hospital.

Mrs. Gorbachev had been at the hospital since July 25. She originally underwent chemotherapy and had shown some improvement, but had been in critical condition in recent days.

Mikhail Gorbachev, who served as Soviet leader from 1985-91, stayed in Muenster to be near his wife throughout her illness.

Bright, slim, fashionable and outspoken, Mrs. Gorbachev was the very antithesis of the typical Soviet leader's wife. With the sole exception of Vladimir Lenin's wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, she was the only Kremlin wife ever to carve out a public role for herself — something few Russians ever accepted.

A former philosophy instructor, she charmed Western audiences with her intellect, poise and designer clothes.

But many Russians disliked her, and Gorbachev conceded in his memoirs that even his mother had never liked his wife. But he never left any doubt that Raisa — his "Raya" — was the love of his life, his soulmate and partner in both family life and politics.

"We were bound first of all by our marriage, but also by our common views on life," Gorbachev wrote. "We both preached the principle of equality. We shared our common cares and helped each other always and in everything."

Raisa Maksimovna Titorenko was born Jan. 5, 1932, in southern Siberia, and met Gorbachev while both were students at Moscow State University. She studied sociology; he studied law. The two were married in September 1953, and moved to Gorbachev's home region of Stavropol in southern Russia when he graduated in 1955.

Mrs. Gorbachev taught Marxist-Leninist philosophy in Stavropol, and later took a job as a lecturer at her alma mater, Moscow State, when her husband returned to Moscow as a rising Communist Party official. She gave up her job when Gorbachev became Communist Party chief in 1985.

Mrs. Gorbachev never fully adjusted to life as the wife of a Soviet leader. "She was never quite comfortable among the "Kremlin wives,"' her husband wrote. But she never let their approbation stop her from exercising her role as her husband's No. 1 advisor.

Describing the intense preparations for a Communist Party congress in 1986, Gorbachev wrote: "Raisa Maksimovna was there practically the whole time, listening to our discussions and participating in them. Her experience in social research, her work with university youth, and simply her knowledge of everyday life and female intuition, proved to be useful."

When Gorbachev was placed under house arrest during an attempted coup in 1991, his wife suffered what she later described as an "acute hypertensive crisis" that resembled a minor stroke.