As Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union passed away, a remarkable Pizza Hut advert filmed in 1997 resurfaced. In the ad, Gorbachev walked alongside his granddaughter across Moscow’s famous Red Square and entered a Pizza Hut. The other customers quickly took notice of his arrival, and two men got engaged in a fierce debate over Gorbachev’s legacy. Gorbachev’s detractor accused him of bringing about ‘economic confusion’, ‘political instability’, and ‘complete chaos’ while his supporter praised him for introducing ‘opportunity’, ‘freedom’, and ‘hope’. “Thanks to him, we have Pizza Hut!” the thankful restaurant visitors cheered in the closing shots, acknowledging that Russia’s path towards modernization was unleashed by Gorbachev.
Well, is that Gorbachev’s legacy? Even a quarter of a century after that ad was aired? It should be remembered that somebody named Vladimir Putin didn’t capture control of the power corridors of the Kremlin when this pizza ad was made.
Putin would come to the helm of Russia on the first day of this millennium and his iron grip has now spanned 23 years and continues. Senior Russian journalist Alexei Venediktov, of course, said at the end of this July that Gorbachev was ‘upset’ his reforms had been destroyed by the tyrannical Putin. Interestingly, the duration of Gorbachev’s regime was brief – less than seven years, from 1985 to 1991, until the collapse of the Soviet Union.
But he certainly emerged as the most influential world leader in the second half of the twentieth century. As UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said, he “changed the course of history”. Many Russians blame Gorbachev for the collapse of the Soviet Union and an uncomfortable period of rapid socio-economic transformation and years of turmoil.
It’s highly possible that Putin, a hardline proponent of Russian supremacy, endorses that view too. Putin, of course, said Gorbachev had ‘a huge impact in the course of history’ – an impact he himself is undoing with utmost effort. Some in Russia even think Gorbachev had deliberately led the Soviet Union to its demise.
However, history would tell us that Gorbachev didn’t want to dissolve the Soviet Union, rather he was compelled to do so in 1991 after a shambolically organized coup by communist hardliners failed. Well, some like the above-mentioned Pizza Hut customer are still there in Russia who hail him for affording them the freedom to express opinions, and also economic freedom that most Russians had never previously experienced.
After taking power in 1985, Gorbachev introduced reforms and opened the Soviet Union to the world. Within no time, in 1986, Gorbachev stunned American President Ronald Reagan at a summit in Reykjavik, Iceland, by proposing to eliminate all long-range missiles held by the United States and the Soviet Union.
The end of the Cold War thus began. Gorbachev then refused to intervene when eastern European nations rose against their Communist rulers, and also marked the end of the bloody Soviet war in Afghanistan that had raged since 1979.
That would certainly not mark the end of the Afghan problem, but that’s another issue that Gorbachev couldn’t foresee. After initially vacillating, he admitted to the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. In 1988, he unilaterally drew down Warsaw Pact forces in Europe without waiting for a reciprocal agreement with NATO nations. No wonder he is seen in the West as an architect of reform who triggered the end of the Cold War. Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher called him “a man one can do business with”. And he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990 “for the leading role he played in the radical changes in East-West relations”.
Let’s look back to the pizza ad. Gorbachev’s most ambitious plan was to change the age-old Soviet lifestyle through his efforts to revitalize the Soviet Union’s economy through ‘perestroika’ (meaning restructuring), its society through ‘glasnost’ (meaning openness), and its politics through ‘demokratizatsiya’ (meaning democratization). Certainly, ‘perestroika’ sought to introduce market-like reforms to the state-run system in the struggling Soviet economy. And ‘glasnost’ did allow people to criticize the government in a previously unthinkable way. “I began these reforms, and my guiding stars were freedom and democracy, without bloodshed. So, the people would cease to be a herd led by a shepherd.
They would become citizens,” Gorbachev said later. The success of Gorbachev’s over-ambitious policies should not be judged in the short term though. One may judge it from the perspective of present-day Russia – just after three decades of the disintegration of the Soviet Union. What about democracy in Russia after 1991? During an interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour in 2012, Gorbachev thought Russian democracy was ‘alive’ but added: “That it is ‘well’… not so. I am alive, but I can’t say that I’m fine.”
He explained that the “institutions of democracy are not working efficiently in Russia, because ultimately they are not free.” What Gorbachev didn’t explicitly say was that Russia could never experience democracy in the true sense of the term, except possibly the brief drunken regime of Boris Yeltsin which can be treated as something close to democracy.
Incidentally, Gorbachev ran for the presidency in 1996 and ended up getting only 0.5 per cent of the vote share. In fact, Gorbachev’s attempt to democratize the Soviet Union was possibly more ambitious than his other projects. For centuries Russia was ruled by the Tsars – remaining geographically and politically far away from the heart of Europe and its renaissance. Living under the Tsarist regime may, thus, be inscribed within the mindset of the society a bit. Gorbachev, certainly, was a great reformer. But he was a reformer in a hurry. He intended to change a lot – in the basics of the society, economy, and political system of the Soviet Union – within a very short period of time.
It was seen that the stagnant, congealed Soviet society and its systems and mindset were not ready to involve all these within a blink. The legacy of Tsarist Russia, certainly, continued in the USSR regime, and that could eventually produce another Tsar in the form of Putin.
Gorbachev couldn’t foresee it. And that’s his biggest failure. Gorbachev was overtaken by events and people within the power corridors of Moscow that formulated the basis for the collapse of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev’s legacy, thus, should be judged along with Putin’s regime, the Ukraine invasion, and a new cold war that is brewing in the present world. Is Gorbachev like Prince Abimanyu of Mahabharata who entered the Chakrabyuha with a mission of reforming the Soviet Union? But, still, few leaders have had a more profound effect on the global order than Gorbachev did. His policies, his idea of ‘glasnost’, certainly could reshape the lives of millions in East Europe, Asia, and the world.
I personally feel that the fall of the Berlin wall, glasnost and perestroika, the end of the cold war, and the disintegration of the Soviet Union were the most important international events that not only did change the world order but also shaped our outlook towards life during our most important formative years, that is in our college days. And I always wondered to what extent Gorbachev’s policy influenced even the economic reform in India in the early 1990s. The slice of pizza offered by Mikhail Gorbachev was tasteful for millions worldwide. But, in Russia, the pizza remained tempting yet halfbaked. Alas