"Those Days Were Horrible"

By Susan Tifft

Raisa Gorbachev has not been seen in public since Aug. 22, when, looking haggard and pale, she walked down the steps of the plane that carried her and her family back to Moscow after 72 hours of house arrest in the Crimea. But last week the world did get a chance to read what the 59-year-old wife of Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev had to say about her ordeal and, in a newly released memoir, about her earlier foreboding of what lay ahead.

In her first postcoup interview, Raisa told the Soviet trade-union newspaper Trud she was so terrified that the plotters would kill her and her family that she suffered speech problems and an "acute bout of hypertension" for which she is still being treated. "Those days were horrible," she said.

She first learned of the putsch at about 5 p.m. on Sunday, Aug. 18, when an agitated Gorbachev told her that a group of men had arrived from Moscow to see him and that all the phone lines were dead, including the "red phone" that links the President to the Minister of Defense. The whole family quickly agreed they would stick by the President at all costs. "This was a very serious decision," Raisa told Trud. "We know our history." This may have been a reference to the Bolsheviks' grisly execution of the last Russian Czar, Nicholas II, and his family.

During the attempted coup, the Gorbachevs took frequent walks outside the dacha so that they could talk without fear of being bugged. By showing themselves, they also hoped to disprove the plotters' assertion that the President was ill.

Raisa told Trud, "I never thought such a thing ((as the coup)) could happen to us." But in her autobiography, I Hope (HarperCollins; $20), completed four months before the failed putsch, the Soviet First Lady says she has long been anxious about the "fierce struggle now going on between loyalty and treachery" in the Soviet Union. In the book, actually an extended interview with Soviet writer Georgi Pryakhin, Raisa discloses for the first time that her grandfather was executed under Stalin, an experience that made her both fearful and contemptuous of apparatchiks who act one way "when it is to their advantage" and another when it is not. "Sometimes I feel that they are not faces but masks," she says. "And the masks will suddenly disappear and I can see quite clearly the faces of the people who informed on my grandfather."

Gorbachev anticipated the threat from communist hard-liners as early as August 1990, during a vacation in Yalta. It was then, Raisa recalls, that her husband told her, "We've got the most difficult time ahead of us. There is going to be political fighting . . . it's very alarming . . . ((But)) we mustn't give in to the conservatives . . . We mustn't surrender the fate of the country to cowboys. They would ruin everything." $

In I Hope, Raisa describes her early years as one of three children of a railroad engineer in Siberia. Money was so tight that she did not own a real overcoat until she went to college. "Everybody remembers the coat," she says. "It really was a milestone in the family history."

Materially, life at Moscow State University was not much better; the Soviet First Lady admits she economized by beating fares on the subway and trams. But romantically, her world blossomed. She speaks poignantly of meeting Mikhail Gorbachev at a student dance and of their love, which deepened on long walks and ice-skating dates in Sokolniki Park. Soon after marrying in 1953, the Gorbachevs moved to Mikhail's birthplace of Stavropol, where Raisa taught college and her husband began his climb through the party ranks.

In 1978, at 47, Mikhail became a Secretary of the Central Committee and the couple moved to Moscow, where Raisa felt very much the outsider among the spoiled communist elite. Once, at a gathering at a state dacha, she warned the children not to break the chandelier. "I was told: 'Not to worry. It's government property, it can be written off.' " By March 10, 1985, the night before he was chosen to replace Konstantin Chernenko as General Secretary, Gorbachev was so frustrated with the party's self-satisfied sclerosis that he told his wife, "((The country)) just can't go on like this." Despite her commitment to her husband's reforms, Raisa admits that so far perestroika "has given us much and very little."

Raisa paints the Soviet leader as a hardworking man who likes to sing and kid his sometimes prissy mate. She acknowledges her unpopularity in her own country and scoffs at the criticism from some quarters that she has put on airs. And she points to continuing threats from both the left and the right. "In the center of this gigantic whirlwind is the person closest to me," she says. "Will we be able to come out of the whirlwind with honor?" There is now some hope.

With reporting by Ann M. Simmons/Moscow and Nancy Traver/Washington