NONFICTION - June 2, 1991

RAISA by Urda Jurgens, translated by Sylvia Clayton (Summit Books: $19.95; 152 pp.). Here’s an amusing idea for an undergraduate lit, or perhaps sociology, class: Have everyone read Kitty Kelley’s book on Nancy Reagan along with journalist Jurgens’ biography of Raisa Gorbachev, and then discuss the role of First Ladies, and biographers, in American and Russian culture. This slim volume is limited by certain restrictions--foreigners cannot even visit the cities where Raisa Gorbachev’s mother and mother-in-law live. And there is a polite respect underlying Jurgens’ prose. Kelley uses information to make her subject squirm, as though she were under the harsh light of a police interrogation room. Jurgens uses it to illuminate.

Raisa comes off as a heroine, albeit one with human foibles--an exasperating taste for fine clothes that angers many of her impoverished countrymen, and independence at odds with the more subservient behavior expected of a political wife. Jurgens is an insightful writer of gentle manner but firm opinions, who takes Reagan to task for criticizing Raisa Gorbachev’s involvement in her husband’s career (a rather hypocritical stance, as history has shown us). If only she’d had half again as much access.