“Doomed to serve ideology and bear the heavy burden of the arms race, it was strained to the utmost.” “Our society was stifled in the grip of a bureaucratic command system,” Gorbachev wrote. In his memoirs, he said he had long been frustrated that in a country with immense natural resources, tens of millions were living in poverty. Soon after taking power, he began a campaign to end his country’s economic and political stagnation, using “glasnost,” or openness, to help achieve his goal of “perestroika,” or restructuring. Gorbachev never set out to dismantle the Soviet system. “In the ad, he should take a pizza, divide it into 15 slices like he divided up our country, and then show how to put it back together again,” quipped Anatoly Lukyanov, a one-time Gorbachev supporter. His former allies deserted him and made him a scapegoat for the country’s troubles. In 1997, he resorted to making a TV ad for Pizza Hut to earn money for his charitable foundation. His run for president in 1996 was a national joke, and he polled less than 1 percent of the vote. Russians blamed him for the 1991 implosion of the Soviet Union - a once-fearsome superpower whose territory fractured into 15 separate nations. And with more persistence and determination,” he said. “I am often asked, would I have started it all again if I had to repeat it? Yes, indeed. “I see myself as a man who started the reforms that were necessary for the country and for Europe and the world,” Gorbachev told The Associated Press in a 1992 interview shortly after he left office.
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