NATION : Raisa Endorses Right to Speak

First Lady Raisa Gorbachev said today that candidates in this weekend’s parliamentary elections such as communist firebrand Boris N. Yeltsin should be allowed to state their views freely.

She declined, however, to say if she’ll vote for him.

As she guided a group of Soviet and American students on a tour of the Kremlin, the wife of President Mikhail S. Gorbachev offered a rare glimpse of her views on domestic politics when asked twice by reporters to comment on Yeltsin’s campaign for a seat in the new Congress of People’s Deputies.

“Everything is normal,” she said. “Every candidate has a right to his program, to stating it, to its reasoning. And the people have a right to express their attitude to it.”