Gorbachev, then in his eighties, watched from the audience as two of the country’s best-known actors played him and his beloved wife Raisa. Now, following his death this week at the age of 91, the production feels like part of a bygone era. Not just in the heady days of perestroika in the 1980s, when Gorbachev rolled back decades of Soviet repression, but even in recent times before President Vladimir Putin stopped tolerating even the mildest forms of criticism. The invasion of Ukraine underscored how far Putin has gone to dismantle Gorbachev’s legacy by rolling back the freedoms he introduced — such as free speech and the right to an independent press — and nursing historic grievances about the Soviet collapse. Tatyana Stanovaya, founder of the Moscow political consultancy R.Politik, said that, in Putin’s mind, he was simply correcting Gorbachev’s mistakes. Gorbachev and his wife Raisa shake hands with Mickey and Minnie Mouse at the entrance to Tokyo Disneyland in April 1992 © Yoshikazu Tsuno/AFP/Getty Images “Putin believes that Gorbachev was too naive with the West and allowed the Soviet Union to collapse. He believes that a smarter, stronger, tougher geopolitical line could stop it,” he added. He viewed Gorbachev as a “weak politician who could not prevent the ‘catastrophe,’” as Putin described the collapse of the Soviet Union, he explained. “For Putin this is yet another event that shows he is on the right side of history.” Putin paid his respects on Thursday as Gorbachev was in condition at Moscow’s Central Clinical Hospital, but will not attend the former leader’s funeral on Saturday due to a scheduling conflict, the Kremlin said. Nor will the funeral be a full state affair, while Russia’s international pariah status due to its war of aggression in Ukraine and difficulty traveling to Moscow means no foreign dignitaries have committed to making the trip. Gorbachev, gravely ill in recent months, has not commented publicly on the war in Ukraine but has expressed his sorrow privately, his longtime interpreter and a radio editor close to him said. Yevgeny Mironov, who played Gorbachev in the theatrical account of his life in 2020 © Pavel Kashaev/Alamy Under Putin, however, Russians have lost the freedom to criticize. People posting anti-war messages face years in prison for “disparaging the armed forces”, while celebrities have been kicked out of the state-funded culture industry or pressured to retract anti-war comments. The fate of the couple who took on the roles of Gorbachev and his wife in the 2020 production underscores this. Evgeny Mironov, who played Gorbachev, signed a letter opposing the invasion soon after it began. But a few months later, he was visiting the war-torn Ukrainian city of Mariupol with Andrey Turchak, head of Putin’s ruling United Russia party. Such trips and the publicity surrounding them reinforce the Kremlin’s message that it was a “liberator” rather than destroying and capturing cities while leaving tens of thousands injured and dead. The actress who played Raisa, Chulpan Khamatova, had to flee Russia since the invasion. Speaking this week from exile in Latvia, she praised Gorbachev as a “pacifist” who ended the war in Afghanistan and brought freedoms to the Soviet Union. For many others in Russia, however, these values ​​do not make Gorbachev a hero. Instead, he is criticized for destroying Russia’s great power status on the world stage, which allowed the Soviet Union to collapse and let its vast empire disintegrate allowing groups such as Ukraine to secede from the bloc. This desire to restore a lost greatness underpins much of the popular support for the invasion of Ukraine among the Russian public. Putin has described the war as, in effect, an attempt to reverse Gorbachev’s legacy by returning land lost as a result of the breakup of the Soviet bloc.

Indeed, the freedoms Gorbachev brought turned many Russians against him, according to Andrei Kolesnikov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Leaders who give people freedom are not popular” in Russia, he said. “People don’t love freedom. They don’t like to use it because it’s hard[and has]too many risks”. Whereas in an authoritarian system, “you are told what to do, you are told what to think and who to vote for . . . It is very convenient.” In state media, where the Kremlin’s messages are broadcast to TV viewers around the clock, grudging respect for Gorbachev’s office has not masked resentment of his legacy. “In six years he destroyed our homeland and betrayed the entire socialist camp,” said Vladimir Solovyov, one of the main presenters on Russia’s state television. “Did he realize what he was doing? No he did not.” But Khamatova insisted that the freedoms introduced by Gorbachev during the dying days of the Soviet Union could never truly be taken away. “The greatest treasure he gave us is all the freedoms,” he told TV Rain, an independent Russian news station also in exile in Latvia. “Freedom of movement, speech, sexual orientation, religious belief – you can’t take them away. People have developed a certain immunity to unfreedom and lying.”