First ladies forge a bond over politics and children

0 Comments | Insight on the News, April 22, 1996 | by Helen Boldyreff Semler

No one understands better the tribulations of Hillary Rodham Clinton than shy, soft-spoken Naina, wife of Russian President Boris Yeltsin. She remembers only too well how the press and even ordinary people in Russia turned against the high-profile Raisa Gorbachev. Drawing a lesson from that, Naina has stayed firmly and inconspicuously in the background.

"I am only the president's wife," Mrs. Yeltsin told the American press. "I shudder when people call me the first lady." Even so, she laments, "everything I say or do as the president's wife is made into an intrigue and then held against my husband."

During the last presidential summit in Moscow, Naina complained to Hillary that work for charitable causes had earned her the sarcastic title of "lady philanthropist." Hillary quipped, "Boy I could use criticism like that!"

The two women met for the first time in July 1993 while accompanying their husbands to the Tokyo G-7 talks. If Hillary Clinton personified the middle-class stability and new status of liberated American women with professional careers, Naina Yeltsin came from the Soviet crucible: family persecuted under Stalin, war, hardships, the monotony of Soviet life and the challenge or raising two children while supervising 100 workers at the Institute of Waterways in Sverdlovsk. Like most of the wives of important Communist leaders -- her husband was party chief in Sverdlovsk before Mikhail Gorbachev invited him to Moscow -- Naina kept a low profile.

With such differing backgrounds, one might not have expected the two first ladies to establish an immediate rapport. "It was passion for children and concern for their health that created the immediate bond between us," recalls the usually reticent Mrs. Yeltsin, who dropped all reserve when Mrs. Clinton raised the subject of children.

Having learned of Naina's modest plea for some children's dental supplies, Hillary arranged for dental and surplus medical equipment to be shipped to Moscow. By the end of October 1993, 400 vans had arrived in Moscow with $38 million worth of equipment from dismantled American military hospitals in Germany that had been intended for use in the event of a Soviet attack on the West. The code name was "Project Provide Hope." Naina's softly contoured face with the typical Russian high cheek bones framed by cropped russet hair lit up with pleasure. "I don't know how to thank you," she said, pressing both hands to her heart.

Recalling the beaming face, Hillary Clinton says, "I was immensely impressed by Mrs. Yeltsin's strength and gentleness, and by her commitment to the children of Russia." What started as a gesture of goodwill on Hillary's part grew into a working partnership. During the next three years the first ladies--both of whom eventually gave up their jobs because of their husbands' careers--used their education, experience and knowledge to initiate and support health-care programs for Russian women and children. Thanks to their efforts, health-care projects have priority in the work of the Gore-Chernomyrdin Commission that deals with a broad range of U.S.-Russian issues.

Mrs. Yeltsin was born Anastasia Girina in 1932 to a family of poor peasants in the Orenburg region of the Russian Federation. Her father, who she recalls as "the embodiment of tenderness and affection," survived the brutal collectivization of Russian agriculture but was killed in 1968 as he stood in the way of a drunken motorcyclist to protect her mother.

Naina Girina and Boris Yeltsin met at the Ural Polytechnical Institute in Sverdlovsk, one of the Soviet Union's leading engineering schools. They received degrees in construction engineering in 1956. Recalling their courtship, Boris wrote in his memoirs: "I fell in love with her then, tender-hearted and good, for the rest of my life. She accepted me the way I was--stubborn and prickly. It was not easy for her."

Naina still vividly recalls an incident early in their married life when Boris headed a construction project in Sverdlovsk (renamed Yekaterinburg since the collapse of the Soviet Union). Through a torrential rain she saw him climb onto a huge crane that was shaking in the wind and threatening to come apart. "Get down," she screamed, "the crane will collapse!" But Yeltsin kept climbing until at last he brought the contraption under control. As her husband kept climbing higher and higher in his political career she had nightmares about him dying. "I only sleep when he sleeps," Naina says. And since the president seldom gets more then four hours of sleep a night, Naina fares no better.

Mrs. Yeltsin's agonizing transition from wife of a regional party boss to her role as the Russian first lady began in 1985 when Mikhail Gorbachev appointed Yeltsin to head the Communist Party Committee for the city of Moscow. The move to Moscow after 35 years of living and working in Sverdlovsk traumatized Naina. "I suffocate in Moscow," she says. She not only misses her home and friends but also has been in constant fear for her husband's life, "Here my husband's hair turned white," she says, recalling his battle with Gorbachev, his severe depression upon being fired from his job and the day he fell into a river and almost froze to death. "It was not an accident," Naina says ominously. "The press said he was drunk, but I know he was not.... He was pushed off the bridge into the icy water."