I remember reading about Gorbachev for the first time and pissing myself laughing.
The guy’s an absolute buffoon who thought it would be sensible to do social democracy in the communist country. He fell for Yeltsin and the gang swearing allegiance, only for them to usurp him and do a bit of oligarchic rapid neoliberalism instead, leaving him the equivalent of a human pikachu meme.
The pizza hut ads and shit were his way of making money to continue his cause of ‘advancing social democracy’, which was now all but dismantled in the west now that the bulwark of communism was gone.

Yeltsin is a wild ride too, considering his family were kulaks and unlike basically every communist official, he didn’t join the party until he was like 30. It’s like, if anyone had paid any attention to him throughout his career, even a child could have said “this is the one, officer - this is the counter-revolutionary right here”