Raisa Gorbacheva Raisa Gorbacheva Raisa Maximovna Gorbacheva ( "Raisa Maksimovna Gorbachyova", , Титаре́нко; 5 January 1932 – 20 September 1999) was a Russian activist who was the wife of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. She raised funds for the preservation of Russian cultural heritage, fostering of new talent, and treatment programs for children's blood cancer. Raisa Maximovna Titarenko was born in the city of Rubtsovsk in the Altai region of Siberia. She was the eldest of three children of Maxim Andreyevich Titarenko, a railway engineer originally from Chernigov in Ukraine, and his Siberian wife, Alexandra Petrovna Porada, originally from Veseloyarsk. She spent her
Rosa Raisa closed. (It can be heard on Youtube, accessed on May 2, 2015.) Raisa suffered from cancer, having undergone a double mastectomy in the 1940s. She died on September 28, 1963, and her granddaughter, Suzanne Homme, told Raisa's biographer Charles Mintzer that her death certificate listed "bone cancer" as the immediate cause of death. She was buried in Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City (Los Angeles), California. Raisa's relatively few recordings (from 1917-1933 for four different record companies, Pathe, Vocalion, Brunswick, and Italian HMV) reveal a beautiful timbre and a florid technique rare in singers of her type. Her famous vocal