Moscow, December 25, 1991

His departure from the Kremlin is as low key as Gorbachev’s eight years previously. Yeltsin returns to his office after a farewell lunch at 1 p.m. and presents Putin with the squat fountain pen with which he signed decrees. “Take care of Russia,” he says and leaves the Senate Building for good.¹⁸ Both Yeltsin and Gorbachev are invited to attend Putin’s inauguration as acting president but avoid each other.

On the tenth anniversary of his abdication, Gorbachev’s contempt for the republic leaders who conspired with Yeltsin to break up the Soviet Union remains undiminished. “I was shocked by the treacherous behavior of those people, who cut the country in pieces in order to settle accounts and establish themselves as tsars,” he tells reporters in Moscow on December 25, 2001. He could not oppose them at the time, he says, because that might have led to civil war in a nation brimming with nuclear weapons. “And what is Russia without the Soviet Union? I don’t know. A stump of some sort.”

Asked if he is happy, Gorbachev admits to not knowing what happiness is but remarks that fate allowed him to lead a process of renewal that involved the whole world. “God! What other happiness could there be!”

The former Soviet president meanwhile is embarking on a lucrative new profession as a model for advertising agencies. In December 1997 he appears in an advertisement for Pizza Hut, for which he is paid $150,000. It includes a scene at a café table in which customers argue whether Gorbachev brought freedom or chaos to Russia and concludes with an old woman saying that because of him the pizza topping goes all the way to the edge of the crust, at which all cry out, “Hail, Gorbachev!”¹⁹ Gorbachev cites the need for funds for his foundation as the reason for subjecting himself to this indignity. In 2005 he makes a cameo appearance in the video game series Street Fighter II. In 2007, the man who once possessed the nuclear suitcase allows himself to be used by French fashion house Louis Vuitton to sell their vanity cases around the world. This advertisement, photographed by Annie Leibovitz, shows a pensive Gorbachev in the back of a limousine, a Louis Vuitton bag on the seat beside him, being driven past the graffiti-covered Berlin Wall. The publication poking out of the bag has a barely readable headline in Russian: “The Murder of Litvinenko: They Wanted to Give Up the Suspect for $7,000,” a reference to the poisoning by radioactive isotope of Russian exile Alexander Litvinenko in London the previous year. On his deathbed Litvinenko blamed agents of Putin’s Kremlin. The company’s ad agency Ogilvy & Mather denies trying to convey any subliminal message. The magazine AdWeek describes the Louis Vuitton image as one of the most successful commercial photographs of the decade.

In 2006, the year when both Gorbachev and Yeltsin celebrate their seventyfifth birthdays, they still have not mellowed towards each other. Yeltsin accuses Gorbachev, for the first time openly, of having advance knowledge of the August coup and waiting it out to see who would win. “Yeltsin is a liar; it’s sheer nonsense,” responds Gorbachev.

Boris Yeltsin dies of congestive heart failure on April 23, 2007, at age seventysix. He is buried in the Novodevichy Cemetery. Putin, then in the second of two four-year terms as president, declares the day of his funeral a national day of mourning. Mikhail Gorbachev goes to the burial and offers faint praise, extending his condolences “to the family of a man on whose shoulders rested many great deeds for the good of the country and serious mistakes—a tragic fate.” Andrey Kolesnikov, writing in Kommersant, describes seeing Gorbachev downcast and suddenly looking much older. “It was evident that he was suffering in ways that few in the hall were; together with the life of Boris Yeltsin, a piece of his own life had been torn away.”

Two years later, at age seventy-eight, Mikhail Gorbachev announces that he is returning to politics with the creation of a new political party, the Independent Democratic Party of Russia, which he cofounds with billionaire Alexander Lebedev, part owner of the Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta (New Gazette) and proprietor of three UK newspapers. The party is to be “social-democratic” and advance an “anticrisis initiative” developed by economists at the Gorbachev Foundation.

Gorbachev’s ardor for the United States cools further over the years. In 2009, as the United States and Europe struggle with economic crises, he chides Americans “who indulged in the euphoria of victory in the Cold War” for thinking that the West’s system did not need any changes. “So if you insist on me giving advice… I do believe that what America needs is its own perestroika.”²⁰