BOOK MARK : Raisa Gorbachev Tells All--Or as Much as She Wants

Question: Your mother’s parents were of a peasant family. Did they have an easy life?

Answer: Don’t you believe it--as my mother tells me now. Don’t you believe that peasants were prosperous in the past. It was hard and hopeless labor. The land, the cattle and little to eat. “Your poor grandmother!” my mother, Aleksandra Petrovna, exclaims every time. It was forced labor and not a normal life that she had. She plowed, sowed, washed the clothes and fed six children. And not a word of complaint.

Lenin gave my parents land--that is what my mother always says. Previously, they didn’t have their own land. They were told, according to my mother, to take as much as they wanted, as much as they could cultivate. But at the beginning of the 1930s, my grandfather’s family were treated as “rich peasants,” their land and house were taken from them and they had to make a living by casual work. And later, my mother says, grandfather was accused of Trotskyism. He was arrested and disappeared without a trace.

Q: Really! My grandfather was expropriated and my father shipped from one part of the country to another. Where else can you come across this sort of thing? But in Russia, however painful it may be, you find it at every step.

A: Yes, don’t be surprised. My mother still has no idea who Trotsky was, and my grandfather certainly didn’t know. We all lived through this common tragedy. That is why today I am so frightened by the appeals you hear on every side to “seek out the guilty ones.” It would only lead to another round of bloodshed.

Nationalism and extremism are spreading today like a cancerous growth in the fabric of people’s national self-awareness. It so happens that I have both Russian and Ukrainian roots. I have a good idea of what is meant by mutual relationships and links and mutual help between people of various nationalities. I am profoundly convinced that this is the invisible medium in which alone it is possible for each separate human life and our human civilization itself to survive. That is what made it possible for us to hold out, to endure--or, as my mother would have said, to “make it through” the bitterest years and days experienced by our Motherland. And I find it extremely alarming when I see holes appearing in that priceless medium for human morality.

Q: You have pointed out the difficulty Soviet women today have juggling their responsibilities. How can we reconcile a woman’s desire to work and have a profession with her desire to have a family?

A: That is today a universal, worldwide problem and a very difficult one to solve. The conditions affecting women’s work and its payment, and the state’s support of the family, in the Soviet Union, to put it mildly, leave much to be desired.

I am sure that the problematical and complicated balancing of a job and family obligations in our life is one of the reasons for the lower level of women’s professional qualifications and the slowness of their advance in employment. After all, the percentage of women with secondary education is not less than the percentage of men. And there are just as many -- even more -- women among students at university as men. But then, as they advance in years, the women begin to fall behind.

Take the field of science, which I know best. There are, of course, fewer post-graduates among women scientists than among the men. Even fewer have doctorates. And among the living, “full” academicians today, how many are women? You can count them on your fingers.

The widespread and, on the whole, very attractive image of the woman as the custodian of the home appears, to me today, to be something less than ideal. The times demand that a woman should play a more active part. Contemporary woman probably has as many roles as she has strength and imagination to fulfill them.

Q: In recent times, people in Russia have been talking about “saving one’s soul” in the direct sense. There has been more active interest in the church, in religious literature and in religious teaching and ideas.

A: You remember, of course, that, until 1985, even such books as the Bible and the Koran were considered to be bibliographic rarities. It was impossible to get hold of them or buy them. Today, we are opening up for ourselves a rich, multicolored world inhabited by many forgotten and practically unknown thinkers and zealots of the faith and spirit. In a word, a normal dialogue with the church is beginning in society and the state. The “iron curtain” that existed between them until recently is coming down.

Do you remember the celebrations that marked the 100th anniversary of the arrival of Christianity in Russia? The church today has joined activity in the peacemaking, charitable and patriotic work in society. This is extremely important for us. Ours is a multiethnic country, with people in it of many different faiths, and social accord greatly depends on all the shepherds of our multimillion flock.

When I visit churches, I invariably talk not only with the clergy but also with the ordinary believers. You see, I understand that people come to church with their pain and their anxieties, and they come in a peculiar state, bringing their pain to God. That means that we people around them failed to notice their pain and did not react to it.

Once when I visited the Svyato-Danilov monastery a woman, already old, asked me: “Raisa Maksimova, why did you not kneel before the icon?” What was I to reply? So I asked her in turn: “Do you believe in God?” “Yes,” she replied.

I said: “Well now, that’s fine. I believe a person cannot live without faith, that’s what makes him a human being. But you will agree--faith can be of various kinds. Most important is: What sort of deeds does it express itself in? I know many worthy people who are atheists, I know people who do not believe in God, but believe in some kind of mysterious supreme force. Your faith does not prevent me from respecting you and your feelings and believing you. The most important thing is to be tolerant and to respect the other person’s view. It is important that, in the name of some faith of our own, we don’t start fighting each other or make each other suffer for it.”

That is my main article of faith, my ideal and my hope.

BOOK REVIEW: “I Hope: Reminiscences and Reflections,” by Raisa Gorbachev, translated by David Floyd, is reviewed on Page 4 of the Book Review section.

1991 by Gorbacheva. Reprinted with permission from HarperCollins.