MOSCOW: The last leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, recalled his love for his wife Raisa, from their first meeting to her death from cancer, in an intimate book of memoirs that he presented on Tuesday.

Gorbachev, 81, signed copies of his latest book, “Alone with Myself”, at a central Moscow bookstore. Dedicated to his late wife, it shows him sitting in front of his wife's portrait on the cover.

Unlike the wives of other Soviet leaders, Raisa Gorbacheva did not stay modestly in the background. Her elegant outfits and active public appearances irritated many in the final years of the Soviet Union but made a good impression in the West.

Gorbachev has always stressed that his love for his wife was the driving force in his life and he experienced deep grief at her death in 1999 after a short battle with leukaemia. The course of true love did not run smooth, Gorbachev revealed in the book.

He and Raisa met at Moscow State University, where she at first paid him little attention.“I felt I was losing my head. I wanted to see Raisa and be wherever she was,” he wrote, but Raisa was getting over a painful breakup and told him she did not want to date him.

“I told her that I could not fulfil her request, that for me it would just be a catastrophe. That was my confession of love,” he said.

Gorbachev said he still could not forgive himself for his wife's death and wondered if he could have done anything differently.

“I return again and again to the last days in Raisa's life and the tortures that she had to go through. What more could I have done, or not done, in my life to avoid this terrible fate?” After she died in a German clinic, he wrote: “I had never felt so lonely in my life.”—AFP