47. Read the following quotations of Hillary Clinton. Discuss them.

“Voting is the most precious right of every citizen, and we have a moral obligation to ensure the integrity of our voting process.”

“The American people are tired of liars and people who pretend to be something they’re not.”

“In the Bible it says they asked Jesus how many times you should forgive, and he said 70 times 7. Well, I want you all to know that I’m keeping a chart”.

“I believe in a zone of privacy”.

“What we have to do... is to find a way to celebrate our diversity and debate our differences without fracturing our communities”.

“You show people what you’re willing to fight for when you fight your friends”.

“The challenge is to practice politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible, possible”.

48. Michael Gorbachev has always stated that he could not have accomplished all changes without the support of his strong and beloved wife Raisa: “She was my heart and soul who gave me the strength to make the most difficult decisions. Therefore she was the foundation for all I ever was able to achieve. Making the world a better place is never an easy task. But we all must find the strength to take the first step – even if the odds are against us. So let’s change the world for the better – together.”

Raisa Gorbachev, Activist First Lady

“Youth is, after all, just a moment, but it is the moment, the spark that you always carry in your heart”.

Raisa Gorbachev

Raisa Gorbachev, 67, whose stylish, forceful, and glamorous performance as the wife of the last Soviet leader, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, made her a lightning rod for attacks on her husband’s programs of economic and political reform.

Mikhail S. Gorbachev led the Soviet Union from 1985 to 1991, first as general secretary of the Communist Party and then as the president of the Soviet Union. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990, survived an attempted coup by communist conservatives in 1991 and resigned the presidency at the end of that year when the Soviet Union voted itself out of existence.

Mrs. Gorbachev was a presence in her husband’s life in a way that was unprecedented in the Soviet experience. She appeared with him in public at home and abroad, served as his eyes and ears on her travels and was one of his closest advisers. Her activities were readily accepted in the West, but they were the subject of much criticism in the Soviet Union.

In any case, it was a long way from Mrs. Gorbachev’s humble origins. She was born Raisa Maksimova Titorenky on Jan. 5, 1932, in the village of Rubtsovsk, Siberia. She grew up in various parts of the Soviet Union where her father was employed as a railroad engineer.

She was a brilliant student and graduated from high school at the head of her class and with the coveted Gold Medal. This got her into the elite Moscow State University, where she studied philosophy. It was there that she met her future husband, a law student and the child of peasants. They were married in 1954. They were so poor that they had to borrow a pair of white shoes from a friend to complete her bridal outfit.

Mrs. Gorbachev earned a doctorate in sociology from the Lenin Pedagogical Institute in Moscow, having written a thesis called “The Emergence of New Characteristics in the Daily Life of Collective Farm Peasantry (Based on Sociological Investigation in Stavropol Territory)”. She taught at the Stavropol Agricultural Institute.

In 1978, the couple returned to Moscow. He entered the inner sanctum of Kremlin power. She joined the faculty of their alma mater. In 1985, she gave up teaching to become an unpaid member of his staff.

“I am very lucky with Mikhail”, she told an interviewer. “We are really friends, or if you prefer, we have great complicity”.

The Gorbachevs were beneficiaries of the Soviet system, but they were also keenly aware of the stagnation and contradictions that were such a prominent part of daily life.

They fit naturally into the “sixties generation”, which struggled to carry forward the efforts, began by former premier Nikita S. Khrushchev in the late 1950s, to shake off the Stalinist legacy of oppression and cruelty.

“We were bound first by our marriage, but also by our common views of life”, Mikhail Gorbachev wrote in his memoirs. “We both preached the principle of equality”.

Mrs. Gorbachev had many supporters as she found her own way, but there were raised eyebrows in one quarter or another about almost everything she did. Some of the criticism was personal, but much of it came from opponents of perestroika (economic reform) and glasnost (openness), the centerpieces of Gorbachev’s policies.

There were questions about activities that have been accepted as a matter of course for First Ladies in the West, such as accompanying her husband abroad and appearing with him in public at home. Once when she called her husband’s attention to a child during a meeting with ordinary citizens in a street, many Soviets were scandalized: a wife does not direct her husband in any way, particularly in public.

Although Mikhail Gorbachev never identified his wife as an adviser in public statements in Moscow, it was widely known abroad that he had done so. By his own account, he relied on her observations of conditions she observed in her travels around the Soviet Union.

“She visited the families of workers and the homes of peasants”, he wrote in his memoirs. “She went to new and old neighborhoods and got to know how medical institutions, household services, shops operated, how the municipal and rural markets worked. This was due both to her natural curiosity and to her professional interest as a sociologist”.

She visited victims of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster and worked to see that they were cared for, and she was the sponsor of a major pediatric hospital in the Soviet Union. She was a key figure in Soviet Cultural Foundation, which had contacts with similar organizations in other countries.

Mrs. Gorbachev also represented her husband at occasions he could not attend for political or other reasons.

Mrs. Gorbachev’s clothes – of a variety, quality and quantity not available to ordinary Soviet citizens – were another source of criticism, as was her manner. She was said to be “imperious”.

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.