Russians moved by Gorbachev's vigil

President Yeltsin, in his telegram to her husband, told of his "pain" at the death of Raisa Gorbachev. The speaker of the Duma, Mr Gennady Seleznyov, a member of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, spoke of "a tragedy of the highest order". The undisguised animosity of both these men to Mikhail and Raisa Gorbachev has, in the past, been renowned.

But now, in a country terrorised by vicious bombers and scandalised by daily reports of massive corruption, Mikhail Gorbachev and his late wife, Raisa, are enjoying a popularity few would have believed possible just a couple of months ago.

In 1996 Mr Gorbachev ran for president and received 0.5 per cent of the vote. If there was anyone less popular than he it was his wife. Lionised in the west, where Russian "first ladies" had previously been dowdy and retiring, Raisa Gorbachev made a striking impression on this side of the "Iron Curtain."

She was articulate, a graduate in philosophy and sociology from Moscow State University, she dressed with greater panache than any of her Western counterparts. In this way she became an icon of the new Soviet Union, the country which her husband had begun to transform with his policies of glasnost and perestroika.

In Russia, Raisa Gorbachev was seen differently. Her ability to change her attire four times a day was viewed as a symbol of the unacceptable privileges enjoyed by members of the Communist Party in a country in which life was austere.

Her influence over her husband's policies, not only in the area of healthcare and women's affairs but in the general thrust of movement towards an open society, was looked on with horror from within the ranks of the Politburo. For most people in Russia, where the values of machismo abound, the president appeared to be the willing victim of a domineering wife. His badly-pronounced and often ungrammatical Russian, compared to her more elegant use of language, served to make that impression more believable.

Blamed for the disintegration of the Soviet Union, when in fact he tried to keep it intact from Boris Yeltsin's attacks upon it, Mr Gorbachev's popularity slumped. Raisa was blamed for her husband's disastrous anti-alcohol campaign which cost him the support at first of vodka-drinking males and later of chocolate-eating females when most of the country's sugar was channelled into the making of moonshine.

When, in August 1991, a hardline coup gave Mr Yeltsin his chance to seize power, Mr Gorbachev was humiliated in parliament by his successor and Raisa, overcome by illness, began to fade from the public eye.

Music groups began to make fun of Mr Gorbachev. One song, Mr Da- doo-da, depicted him as a bureaucrat uttering trite phrases about increasing productivity on collective farms, punctuated with the phrase: "Raisa Maximovna considers this to be a very good thing."

NOW all this has changed. Mr Gorbachev has appeared on TV, haggard and distressed, during his two-month vigil at his wife's bedside. His description of the rapid onset of her leukaemia as being "like snow in July" has been widely repeated.

The press has rallied to the support of the former president. The mass-circulation Argumenty I Fakty newspaper wrote: "Mikhail Sergeyevich never leaves his wife's bedside. It is painful to look at him. This couple is bound together by absolute unity. They cannot live without each other. It used to irritate us. Now we give them their due."

The popular daily Komsomolskaya Pravda ran accounts of the couple's first meeting as students in Moscow and the romance that led to their marriage as a popular serialised love story.

At the Gorbachev Foundation in Moscow, letters of sympathy have poured in from the Russian people during Raisa's illness. One woman, the widow of a general who had privatised and sold her massive state apartment and traded down to a more modest Moscow flat, wrote to offer $25,000 to help pay for Mrs Gorbachev's treatment in Germany.

People from the fastnesses of the Russian countryside sent in their herbal remedies in the hope they might be of help. Both Raisa and her husband were reported to be overcome with emotion at the people's response.

Raisa Gorbachev's death, as her sister Ludmilla Titarenko waited to donate a bone-marrow transplant, has not only launched a wave of sympathy for her husband but has raised comparisons between today's Russia and its officials and the days of glasnost and perestroika. Previously these comparisons placed the Gorbachev era in an extremely unfavourable light. Now, the times of glasnost and perestroika are beginning to look a great deal better.

The new wave of sympathy for Mr Gorbachev is unlikely to move him away from his current position of political obscurity and by now he himself realises this. What it may do, however, is place the Yeltsin era in a different context and diminish even further the dwindling popularity of the Russian President and his supporters.