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The ad opens with a snowy view of Moscow’s Red Square, where a man and his granddaughter head to Pizza Hut. Once inside, other diners gasp as Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, who helped end the Cold War, sits down for a bite.
Arguments occur. In Pizza Hut’s minute-long, 25-year-old ad, which resurfaced Tuesday after Russian news agencies announced Gorbachev had died at age 91, fellow diners are divided over his legacy.
“Because of him, we have economic confusion!” says an old man. “Because of him, we have a chance!” a younger man answers.
The 1997 ad was meant to be tongue-in-cheek, Tom Darbyshire, who wrote the ad for ad agency BBDO, told The Washington Post. Tapping into the debate over the legacy of Gorbachev, a man seen as a hero abroad and a villain in Russia, the ad sought to show that “pizza is one of those foods that brings people together and unites their differences,” Darbyshire said.
But the ad that made Pizza Hut trend on Twitter on Tuesday almost didn’t happen, and it didn’t even air in Russia. It took a year of negotiations for Gorbachev to agree. She refused to eat pizza on camera and asked her granddaughter to do it. That cold morning they had to shoot, he was late, Darbyshire recalled.
“We weren’t sure he was going to show up,” he said. “He was an hour late, the negotiations had been a bit tense and I think he was just doing it because he needed the money.”
The value of Gorbachev’s pension plummeted after the fall of the Soviet Union, Foreign Policy reported. Eliot Borenstein, a professor of Russian and Slavic studies at New York University, said it was “sad and ironic” that the former leader was so strapped for cash that he had to do the commercial, and that the the only way Gorbachev received praise from the Russians was through paid actors.
Despite the initial challenges, Darbyshire said the day of filming was full of emotional moments. They filmed Thanksgiving, and while the crew was eating pizza instead of turkey, Gorbachev got up and insisted on serving the slices, he recalled.
“A day where we give thanks for all that we have in America, our freedoms and our wealth, for him to make that symbolic gesture realizing that he was keeping us away from our families … it was something I will never forget.” he said
The final product reflects Gorbachev’s complicated legacy, said Jenny Kaminer, a professor of Russian at the University of California, Davis. The announcement “aligns with how different generations experienced the collapse of the Soviet Union,” he told The Post in an email.
For some, Gorbachev’s dual policy of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) brought the promise of economic freedom. For the others “Whoever failed to adapt to the rapid transition to a market economy meant extreme poverty, insecurity and a humiliating loss of dignity,” Kaminer said. That divide is similar to how Westerners view Gorbachev and Russians view him, he added.
“Most Russians, I would say, agree with the old man’s verdict [in the ad] who blames Gorbachev for creating chaos and instability, while Westerners cheer him on for defending our supposedly sacred liberal values of “freedom” and “democracy,” Kaminer said.
Biden, Putin and other leaders react to the death of Mikhail Gorbachev
University of Arizona professor Pat Willerton agrees.
“The Russians saw someone whose efforts led to the collapse of the country,” Willerton, a scholar of Russian politics, told The Post. “They saw someone whose efforts accelerated an already deteriorating domestic, political and socio-economic situation. They saw a leader who was naïve in the way he engaged the West. They see the West as making the most of the efforts he made and who put themselves in a position of inferior power.”
The diners in the Pizza Hut ad finally come together when an elderly woman interrupts the fight to chime in: “We got a lot of things like Pizza Hut because of him!” Soon everyone will be standing up to chants of “Hail to Gorbachev!”
In reality, however, not everyone finds this common ground.
As The Post’s David E. Hoffman wrote: “Soviet collapse was not the goal of Mr. Gorbachev, but it may be his greatest legacy. It ended a seven-decade experiment born of utopian idealism that led to some of the bloodiest human suffering of the century.” Still, Gorbachev’s bold moves proved a double-edged sword in a country that historically has valued strong men.
Abroad, he induced “Gorbymania” – drawing huge crowds who showered him with praise for easing what had been stressful nuclear tensions. But at home he became persona non grata, consistently ranking among Russia’s most disliked leaders, even below Joseph Stalin, who ordered executions and forced people into labor camps.
“The diametrically opposed views are a reflection of the world we’re in,” Willerton said. “We are in a completely divided world.”
A 2017 Pew Research Center poll found that more than two-thirds of Russians surveyed said the collapse of the Soviet Union was bad. That number rose among older Russians, the survey found. In the same survey, 58% of Russian respondents rated Stalin favorably, while 22% rated Gorbachev favorably.
How popular is Putin, really?
“In Russia, greatness has nothing to do with being kind; it’s about being strong,” Willerton said. “That’s why a contemporary Russian watching the ad would probably think, ‘Thank God we have [President Vladimir] Putin now after the mess that Gorbachev left. “
Gorbachev was aware of the negative views of the Russians. Initially, concerns about his legacy led him to decline to star in the ad, wrote Madison Darbyshire of the Financial Times in 2019. He finally agreed when “after a dispute with his successor, Boris Yeltsin, he suddenly needed a new real estate office for their foundation,” according to Darbyshire, whose father is Tom Darbyshire.
That need for funds also led Gorbachev to accept another viral moment: a 2007 Louis Vuitton campaign shot by Annie Leibovitz. In it, the former statesman appears in the back seat of a car with the remains of the Berlin Wall in the background.
Gorbachev’s boldest political move in the Putin era? This Louis Vuitton ad from 2007, with a report (in Russian) about the assassination of Putin critic Alexander Litvinenko visibly protruding from the top of her expensive designer bag. pic.twitter.com/U2IbI3UVUe
— John Slocum (@JohnSlocum2) August 30, 2022
Tuesday wasn’t the first time that Gorbachev’s Pizza Hut ad had circulated. The ad has regularly found new audiences online even though it aired before the age of social media. It was widely shared earlier this year amid talk of Russia pulling out of Pizza Hut over the country’s invasion of Ukraine.
Watching the commercial resurface this week unlocked another memory for Darbyshire: the process of translating the script from English to Russian. After reading it, a Russian speaker told him, “We don’t really have a word for freedom the way you think of freedom in America,” Darbyshire said.
“It was an interesting idea, that freedom as we think of it is not even a word that they had a term for, because this is a country that maybe rushed to try democracy without putting all the institutions in place” , he said. said
Gorbachev would later see some of the freedoms celebrated in that commercial reversed under Putin. The pizza memes continue, though.