I was 6 years old when the Soviet Union broke up.
At the time, I didn’t know that the man most responsible for the drastic changes that transformed my homeland in Siberia was a man called Mikhail Gorbachev. I remember standing in line for bread in the dying days of Communism, but I don’t remember much discussion of his “perestroika” (or rebuilding) programs.
It’s too cold for that.
I recall sitting on my father’s shoulder at pro-democracy rallies and surveying the crowds gathered in the square, but the brief conversations I could hear were about people getting fed up. – not about the man with that particular birthmark sitting in the Kremlin, a man I sometimes see on television.
The name on everyone’s lips at that time, the man of the day, was Boris Yeltsin. Mr. Yeltsin, the charismatic former leader of the Communist Party of Russia, replaced Mr. Gorbachev to become the first president of a new, chaotic, violent, poverty-stricken but democratic country called Russia.
Ironically, my first separate, independent memory of Mr. Gorbachev, perhaps for many of my generation, is rooted in 1998 advertisement for Pizza Hut. In it, the Soviet leader ended up taking his granddaughter to a newly opened American fast-food restaurant near Red Square, a move meant to showcase Russia’s unshakable modernization.
“Thanks to him, we have Pizza Hut!” restaurant grateful to visitors cheering in advertising.
I don’t understand why the ads are always trying to massage me in the wrong way. In our Siberian backwaters, we never had any Pizza Alley – few could afford them. Why are people in that ad so complacent? I wonder.
A few months after that ad aired, Russia’s economy fell into its first major crisis since the collapse of the Soviet Union – a sign that unnecessary progress, experts say, has envisioned by Mr. Gorbachev.
When I moved to the West to study, I was amazed at the respect and praise Mr. Gorbachev commanded there. His general image in the West – that of a shrewd, iconic statesman who overcame Soviet hardliners and brought the Cold War to an end without nuclear disaster – contrasts most Russians see him.
In Russia, he was looked down upon. The Communists, still a political power in the 1990s, blamed him for disrupting a country they believed in.
At home, he was seen by many as a traitor, or at least a naive fool.
That sense of betrayal persists in Russia to this day, helping to fuel the rise of Vladimir V.Putin, who six months ago invaded Ukraine, its closest neighbour, against its expansion. NATO.
Analysts made the decision to approve Mr. Gorbachev’s agreement to withdraw hundreds of thousands of Soviet troops from East Germany and allow Germany to reunify after Secretary of State George Bush supposedly assured him that NATO would expand “not an inch to the east.”
However, history played out differently. NATO troops are currently stationed on Russia’s doorstep.
Many in Russia, even those who cheered the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of capitalism, say they are haunted by the thought of what might happen if Mr. his school.
