Liberal no. 40/1999
Dear Mina,
we appreciated her from the start, for her elegant appearance and intelligence. We also loved her for always being by the side of such an important man. Even after the end of Gorbachev’s power, Raissa has always been active in noble and important causes, such as helping children contaminated by the Chernobyl cloud. Now his life has dissolved, cut short by the disease of leukemia. A great woman who marked our time has died, but more importantly, a great love story has ended.
Ferruccio M., Varese
It is not over. A love story like Raissa and Mikhail’s does not end. It is not enough to die. Their deep essence, their intelligence, their culture, their fellowship, their lives will continue. They just fell off. She has moved away only physically, and because of this he will feel her presence even more acutely in every moment, in every little second of his existence, in this house where she has left him, as if in a waiting room, waiting for the solemn moment when he will be called to join her.
They seemed a strong partnership, seen together, Raissa and Mikhail. And, as happens when a truly great “meeting” occurs, the respective strengths have added up, multiplied. So much strength and so much courage and so much intelligence they had to use and reproduce in the various difficult situations that, through them, changed the world.
Together from early on, from school days, from college classrooms. Together even as Mikhail assumed important positions and she continued her work as a lecturer. Together to take a different way of understanding power and politics around the world. Together to the point that Mikhail had become Raissa, to the extreme limit of stating, as he did a few days ago, that he could no longer live without her.
In the shining eyes of that man, who for years was responsible for the fates of the world, I did not see the sense of defeat that death imposes. Instead, there were glimmers of love, of moved tenderness for his infinite woman. With this light stamped on his face, Mikhail seemed to me placed on the ultimate line, the one that opens on the question and mystery of love, even more than death; and, therefore, on the very reasons for existing. There he was, with that air of the ultimate lover, firmly rooted in that point of extreme and painful clarity that coincided with the point, the moment when his Raissa was gone.
I saw in that face, no longer as austere and powerful as it used to be but charged with immense humanity, that death is not the mute and ultimate hatch of love, but the moment when love is sharpened, reduplicated, as if invigorated by the absence of the companion. Perhaps it is only through death and in death that one becomes definitively aware of love. And it is as if Raissa, by leaving him clinging to that poignant heartbreak, has made him more aware of a bond stronger than any cruel arrest.
In the waiting rooms of that German hospital, where efficiency and the smell of polished floors gave way to the finality of that bond, the circularity of love and death unfolded, mysterious. Circularity and welding in which Mikhail and Raissa have forever placed their destinies.
Raissa recently recounted that their first encounters took place with the complicity of music, especially Italian music, which “kind of laid on their souls.” And their youth was also consumed in the study of the classics of Marxism. Their erstwhile teacher also wrote to his wife, in a letter dated June 21, 1856: “I feel like a man again because I feel a great passion … But love not for Feuerbach’s man, not for Moleschott’s metabolism, not for the proletariat, but love for the beloved, for you, makes a man a man again.”
And so we, too, might think back to Raissa for so many elements that defined her, but ultimately just accessories to a soul. We may remember her for the quiet elegance of her suits, for that smart smile of hers, for the points she gave Nancy Reagan when their respective husbands met at planetary summits. But now its essence lies only in Mikhail’s heart. That heart that in all the past and future moments has lived and will live by her and in her. Rapid its passage, burning like an abyssal fire and at once divine their love, lucid and still this death.
No, it is not over. A love story like that does not end.
