FILM SUMMARY

Mikhaïl and Raïssa Gorbachev loved each other deeply, from their first meeting in 1952 until her death in 1999.

With a lengthy interview with President Mikhaïl Gorbachev, this story plunges us into storybook life of this couple as well as the History of Soviet Russia.

PRESENTATION

Mikhail and Raissa Gorbachev were truly and deeply in love from their first encounter in their Moscow student days in 1952, until her death in Germany in September 1999. The narrative, supported by President Gorbachev’s moving testimony, takes us back to the romantic story of the couple and Soviet Russia.
 
How could they have lived such a deep passion, protected their feelings and drawing enough strength from it to remain intimately united throughout a fabulous ascension that would make a young peasant from Southern Russia, an all-powerful leader of the Soviet empire, and his wife, the First Lady of the East, able to challenge her Western equals, while guarding a decisive influence on the condition of women in her own country?

And how did they live through the decline and the fall from power after a succession of dramatic events that bound them even more, while seriously affecting Raissa’s health, to the point of hastening her premature death?

Ambition andcloseness; patience and mutual trust, idealism and poetry, greatness and tragedy, all make their unusually fervent love one of the most moving heartfelt stories of our century.