ABSTRACT
Nadezhda Mandelstam described Soviet women as ‘the real mainstays of the household’ and the ‘guardians of domestic order’. One late Soviet interviewee proclaimed that ‘to have children is probably their main goal in life’, and another advised that mothers should be patient and loving towards their children. Raisa Gorbacheva’s was treated much more in the role of First Lady than any other previous Soviet leader’s wife, who, unlike her, had tended to be kept out of the public eye. In face of hardship and adversity, Mandelstam identifies Soviet women as initially being more challenged than men by the ‘first years of the Revolution’, but in the longer term it was women who proved to be ‘tougher and more likely to survive’. The choice of the mother’s family name was not necessarily always a nod to the revolutionary potential to do so, particularly in the early Soviet period.
