Raisa Met Art

Raisa Met Art
A thoughtful scholar in her own right, she brought glamour to a Soviet leadership caught between reform and collapse
Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning
© 2022 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. (modern)
In 1987, Pravda published a picture of a woman on its front page. Despite its proclamation of sexual equality 70 years earlier, this was an unusual event in the Soviet Union, where the number of famous women could be counted on the fingers of both hands. What made the photograph, in the official organ of the Communist party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), more extraordinary was that the woman pictured was not a prominent official, scientist, cosmonaut or writer but Raisa Gorbachev , who was famous not because of what she had achieved, but because she was married to the leader of the Soviet Union.
Raisa Gorbachev, who has died from leukaemia aged 67, became the star of the final act of the cold war and the secret weapon in her husband's bid to end 50 years of confrontation between Washington and Moscow.
While he battled with Ronald Reagan and George Bush over strategic arms limitation and verification procedures, she visited children's homes, schools and hospitals. When Mikhail was quizzed on human rights and freedom of speech, Raisa was photographed taking tea with leaders' wives, going shopping in Paris, New York and London, and showing off the best in Soviet designer clothes. As he succeeded in convincing Reagan that his "evil empire" sincerely wanted change, she upstaged Nancy with her warmth and her intelligence.
She was the heart behind her husband's battle to win over the minds of the west.
The Raisa and Mikhail show, however, was bitterly resented at home. He was betraying the revolution; she was pilloried for being vain and extravagant. A secret video was supposedly shot of Raisa using an American Express Gold Card to buy a pair of Cartier earrings while on an official visit to London. Mikhail was digging into the murky Soviet past and unsettling the Communist party apparatchiks; Raisa turned up to visit victims of the 1987 Armenian earthquake dressed in fox furs as if she was going to a first night at the Bolshoi.
As Mikhail's reforms became mired in Kremlin infighting and failed to boost the Soviet economy, Raisa was accused of creating a cult of personality and interfering in political decisions. When an attempted coup failed to unseat Mikhail in August 1991, the west sympathised with the ailing Raisa, who had apparently suffered a minor stroke while imprisoned in the Crimea. In contrast, the Soviets thought that the First Lady they never wanted had got her just deserts.
Only in the final months of her life, as she battled with leukaemia in a German hospital, her husband constantly at her bedside, did the Russian people finally show sympathy to Raisa, the wife of the last, and possibly most hated, leader of the Soviet Union.
While her husband was in power, Raisa discouraged any probing into her past. She refused to release biographical details or personal photographs to the press, and, contrary to the spirit of glasnost, banned a book of Raisa jokes from being published. It was a mistake which encouraged damaging rumours. Her enemies claimed she was Jewish or a Tartar; there were even suggestions that she had slept with Leonid Brezhnev in an effort to promote her husband's career.
There were other, more sympathetic, stories - one of which claimed that Raisa's father was a prominent Ukrainian expert on collectivisation, who had fallen foul of Stalin during the 1930s and spent much of the next 20 years in the Gulag. Yet, although it was true that her family had been denounced as kulaks (rich peasants) under Stalin, and her grandfather's property had been confiscated, Raisa experienced a relatively normal childhood in the pre-war Soviet Union.
Raisa Maksimovna Titorenko was born in a village in western Siberia. Her mother was a peasant, illiterate until her 20s; her father was a railway worker who had moved from the Ukraine to work on railway construction in the Altai region. Raisa, their first child, was christened in the Orthodox faith but grew up into the model Soviet schoolgirl. The family moved frequently around the Urals region, but she graduated from secondary school with a gold medal, which allowed her automatic entry to any institute of higher education. In 1949, she chose to study philosophy at Moscow State University.
Two years later, Raisa met a young law student, Mikhail Gorbachev, at a student club. In his memoirs he describes being bowled over by meeting his "destiny", but Raisa was unimpressed, almost indifferent to the Komsomol (young communist) activist from Stavropol, in south-west Russia, who was a year behind her at university. Mikhail spent two months trying to win her attention.
In December 1951, he finally managed to walk her home. Raisa tried to end their burgeoning romance, hinting at an unhappy relationship which had recently ended, but Mikhail persisted and on September 25, 1953, they were married. The wedding celebrations took place six weeks later on November 7, the 34th anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution. The bride wore a white dress of Italian crepe; the groom a suit made of "shock worker" fabric.
Unable to obtain a family room, the couple spent their first months of married life in separate rooms in a student hostel on the Lenin Hills. However, emboldened by the post-Stalin thaw, the Moscow University Komsomol protested to the rector over his treatment of married students, and as a result the Gorbachevs were finally given a room together.
Raisa graduated in 1954 and immediately began work on her doctoral thesis. On his graduation a year later, Mikhail turned down the opportunity to do postgraduate work in the department of collective farm law, and was assigned to the Soviet procurator's office in Moscow. He was offered work in the provinces or in Tadjikistan in central Asia; the couple decided to go to Stavropol instead.
Here Mikhail had a job at the prosecutor's office, but within two weeks he had left to become deputy head of agitation and propaganda for the regional Komsomol organisation. Raisa spent four years as a part-time lecturer on Marxist-Leninist philosophy - a compulsory subject for all students - at local institutes of higher education and at collective farms. An outsider, whose education in the capital was resented by other staff, she finally got a full-time job and used her lectures to discuss Kant, Hegel, Lenin and, on occasion, ethics and the history of religion and atheism. In 1957, Irina, the Gorbachevs' only child, was born.
By the end of the decade Raisa had turned her attention to sociology, a bannedsubject under Stalin, and begun work on her doctoral dissertation, The Development Of New Features In The Life Of The Peasantry In Collective Farms, published in 1967.
In 1970, Mikhail Gorbachev was elected first secretary of the Stavropol region Communist party, a post equivalent to an American state governorship. Raisa continued her research into collective farm society until, in 1978, her husband was elected as secretary of the central committee of the CPSU and the Gorbachevs moved back to Moscow.
In the 1970s and early 1980s the wives of the Soviet leadership kept a low profile. Brezhnev's wife, Victoria, stayed at home making jam and worrying about the scandalous love life and drinking habits of their errant daughter, Galina. No one knew that Yuri Andropov, Brezhnev's successor, was even married until Tatiana, his second wife, appeared at his state funeral in 1984. Anna, the wife of Konstantin Chernenko, kept her work for Moscow cultural organisations separate from her husband's short-lived leadership of the Soviet Union.
There was, nonetheless, a circle of "Kremlin wives" who tussled for power within the tea-drinking circles of Moscow's political elite - just as their husbands fought for position within the Kremlin. Raisa found their endless gossip stiflingly boring, and their abuse of the privileges granted as leaders' wives distasteful. Equally, they had little time for her, and the Gorbachevs' only close friend from the Kremlin was Andropov, then head of the KGB. Some of his snapshots of their holidays appear in Raisa's autobiography.
However, as the wife of a Politburo member, Raisa had a chauffeur-driven car, a rent-free apartment in central Moscow, a country dacha and access to hard-to-find goods sold in special shops. In her memoirs, she recalls especially the books she was able to acquire because of her husband's position. She began to lecture on sociology at Moscow State University, although it was now clear that her career was of less importance than her husband's political rise.
When Mikhail Gorbachev became general secretary of the CPSU in 1985, it was expected that his wife would be kept out of public view. Raisa had, unusually, accompanied her husband on his trip to Britain in 1984 and joined the Thatchers at Chequers, but her presence attracted virtually no press attention. Now, however, she began to appear at her husband's side in public. Her face was picked out from among the old men watching Red Square parades, and she accompanied her husband to Andropov's funeral.
The Soviet media initially conspired in giving Raisa a public profile. But whether her promotion to First Lady was a conscious decision taken by the Gorbachevs is uncertain. If they had known how fiercely she would be villified by ordinary Soviet citizens, and become a focus for the criticism that Mikhail Gorbachev attracted, perhaps Raisa would have chosen to remain an anonymous university lecturer.
What seems clear is that the general secretary was so devoted to his "Raya" that he could not bear to leave her at home. Soon Raisa was tottering up gangplanks in high heels to inspect the Soviet arctic fleet in Murmansk, touring Soviet cities dressed in sharply-cut suits and chic fur collars and hats, always at her homburg-hatted husband's side chatting to factory workers and collective farmers. Most significantly, she accompanied him to dreary, superpower summit meetings.
It was at these gatherings that the western media fell in love with Raisa. She provided colour among the grey suits at photo calls, she destroyed the image of Soviet women as potato-shaped battleaxes in headscarves, and she was taken as evidence that Gorbachev's brand of socialism-with-a-human-face had replaced the sour-faced Mr Nyets of the Brezhnev era.
Raisa's greatest triumph was at the Reykjavik summit in October 1986. Both Washington and Moscow had agreed to keep this meeting low-key. Nancy Reagan and Raisa, whose mututal coolness had become an entertaining side-show to arms negotiations, were supposed to stay away - but, at the last minute, Raisa decided to accompany her husband. The summit ended without agreement but she stole the show touring schools and hot springs.
Raisa Gorbachev was inexperienced in the PR niceties of being a First Lady. On her first trips abroad, Soviet diplomats lacked experience in how to deal with her and what she should do. She could be didactic, and often broke protocol with off-the-cuff remarks, but nonetheless she was seen as an asset to her husband's campaign for easing global tensions.
Shopping trips might have aroused anger from Soviet women, whose lives were spent standing in queues for shoddy goods. However, by 1987 she had apparently found a niche: sick children and women's issues were safe interests for a Soviet leader's wife. But even these got her into hot water with her fellow countrywomen. On a trip to West Germany she was involved in setting up a Soviet edition of Burda, the women's fashion magazine, but it was soon discovered that Soviet printing presses could not produce a sufficiently high quality glossy magazine. The First Lady's pet project could not be ditched, so Soviet hard currency reserves were spent printing the magazine in West Germany. It was available only in hard-currency shops.
It took Mikhail Gorbachev some time to realise that his wife was a liability at home. Despite her speeches on the plight of Soviet women, accusations of her receiving a salary of several thousand roubles for her work for the Soviet Arts Foundation were rife, and rumours about the amount she spent on clothes continued to grow. An interview in which Gorbachev said that Raisa was involved in all his decisions was cut before it was shown on Soviet television.
In October 1987, the then Moscow city party chief, Boris Yeltsin, accused Gorbachev of allowing his wife to create a cult of personality. When she travelled to Washington that December, Soviet officials tried to damp down her popularity by refusing to give details of her schedule. Raisa, however, made the headlines once again, by demanding that an invitation to tea with Nancy was changed at the last-minute to morning coffee.
By 1989 the Raisa fervour had died down. Her trips abroad, her haircuts and her new outfits had become commonplace for the western media. George Bush had replaced Reagan, and Raisa found her fellow grandmother Barbara Bush more congenial company. As the Warsaw Pact crumbled and Gorbachev faced ever-harsher criticism at home, Raisa slipped into the background and busied herself with her grandchildren. She still, though, was the butt of Soviet jokes.
In August 1991, the Gorbachevs were on holiday in the Crimea with their grandchildren, Xenia and Anastasia, when the phone lines were cut and armed soldiers surrounded the villa. While Mikhail Gorbachev dictated his last testament to a video camera, Raisa became increasingly anxious for the girls. The 73 hours the couple spent in captivity led apparently to Raisa, who had a history of high blood pressure, suffering a stroke. When they returned to Moscow, her left arm was paralysed. According to her husband, she never entirely recovered.
The western press soon remarked on her suddenly aged appearance. In the autumn, a volume of autobiography, I Hope, was published by HarperCollins in what was rumoured to be a million-dollar deal brokered personally by Rupert Murdoch. Raisa denied that she was paid so much, but refused to give an exact payment.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Gorbachevs retreated from public view. A vindictive Yeltsin removed their privileges and refused to raise their pension after it became worthless as a result of his 1992 reforms. Gorbachev earned a small salary writing a syndicated newspaper column and it was rumoured that Raisa was forced to sell off some of her wardrobe. The couple, however, continued to travel abroad, working for the Gorbachev Foundation and attending fund-raising dinners. When Gorbachev's own memoirs came out in 1996, Raisa was, as ever, by his side as he promoted the book around the world. She was even happy to add her signature at book signings.
Last July, Raisa Gorbachev was diagnosed as suffering from leukaemia and, accompanied by Mikhail, travelled to Germany for treatment. His distress at her illness was painful. The couple received messages of sympathy from across the world, and even Boris Yeltsin sent condolences from the Kremlin and speeded up the issue of a passport for Raisa's sister to travel to Germany and be tested as a possible bone marrow donor. But Raisa's condition left her too weak to undergo an operation.
Raisa Gorbachev was loved abroad for bringing a dash of colour and a breath of warmth to Soviet politics, and hated at home for refusing to stay in the kitchen and support her husband from the sidelines. Although clumsy in her efforts to play the First Lady of the Kremlin, she undoubtedly helped her husband win the trust of the west.
While the west admired her intelligence and fashion sense - comparing her to Jackie Kennedy - her fellow Soviet citizens preferred another analogy. To them she was Tsarina Alexandra, the hated German wife of the last Russian Tsar, Nicholas II, and, like Alexandra, she destroyed the country by meddling in political affairs. Hated or admired, Raisa will be remembered as one half of a devoted couple who changed the world.
Raisa Maksimovna Gorbachev, academic and sociologist, born January 5, 1932; died September 20, 1999

(833) QART-411
(727-8411)

My Account
My Orders
Auction Watch List
Gallery Wish List
Saved Searches
Sign Out

For Sale
Auctions
All Art

My Account
My Orders
Auction Watch List
Gallery Wish List
Saved Searches
Sign Out

Yes, I’d like to receive newletters

*You Must Agree to the Terms and Conditions

Home >
ALL AUCTIONS

> Raisa M. Blum
> Untitled

Raisa Blum, Limited Edition on Canvas, Numbered Inverso and Hand Signed with Letter of Authenticity. Retail $1,200.00

Listing ID: 1881799 | Item # 252295

01d 15h 07/16/2022 8:00 PM - PDT
1 Day 14 Hours 30 Minutes 4 Seconds

X
Enter your bid and our system will automatically outbid challengers, $1 at a time, until your maximum bid price is met.

Placing an Auto Bid will incrementally outbid other bidders up to your maximum bid amount.

This bid will apply immediately and increase the current auction price to your bid amount.

You are already the high bidder on this listing. If you would like to place an auto bid, enter a higher bid amount and submit.

Browse Art Auctions
Browse Art for Sale
Sell Your Art
About Bidding

Payment Info
Shipping Info
Return Policy

• Personal Service
• Professional design options
• Exceptional quality
We will email suggestions. You can request further options and make special requests.
Only acid free materials contact the art for long term preservation. Paper works are framed with plexi.
Canvas works are typically framed without plexi so that the vibrancy and interaction with light can be best appreciated.
Framing may be cancelled at any point before actual framing work begins.
Quality Guarantee. You may return your item for a refund within 15 days (excluding shipping).
Feel free to contact us with any questions you may have on this service!
No additional charge for shipping. Alaska and Hawaii addresses will have a higher rate which you can see in your cart by the "custom frame it" option.
Raisa M. Blum was born in 1955 in Moldova former USSR, where she studied at the Fine Art school in Kishinev.
Sex Vedos
Sarah Lane Nude
Lingerie Fetish Stories

Raisa Met Art

Report Page