East Germany: 30 years after the end

[Tim]

The GDR was luckier than most of their Communist neighbours, because they could get stuff from West Germany.

Romania was the worst off. Most of the people only had electric power for about two hours a day, and even that was spotty at times.

[BettyNewbie]

This is bizarre.

It's time we returned to this Pizza Hut ad starring none other than Mikahil Gorbachev


The Cold War involved many periods of terrifying nuclear brinkmanship and proxy wars that raged throughout the world, taking unnecessary lives and destabilizing nations all over the globe with imperialist meddling. All of this could have been avoided if only the West knew that they could deploy the mediocre taste of an American pizza chain and good old fashioned capitalist brand warfare to undermine the Soviet Union’s leaders. Case in point: A recently resurfaced Pizza Hut ad starring the former (and final) Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, which really has to be seen to be believed.

The ad aired toward the end of 1997, less than a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Soviet Union. In it, Gorbachev walks into a Russian Pizza Hut along with his granddaughter. His fellow diners spot him and begin discussing whether Gorbachev should be admired or despised for presiding over the Soviet Union’s dissolution.

“Because of him, we have economic confusion!” an older man says, describing the economy of ‘90s Russia in a pretty generous light.

“Because of him, we have opportunity!” replies a younger guy at his table.

“Because of him, we have political instability!” says the diplomatically outraged older man in return.

“Because of him, we have freedom!”

Their argument continues back and forth until the elderly lady with them cuts in to say, “Because of him, we have many things...like Pizza Hut!”

While this statement could be good ammunition for either side’s point, the table instead smiles and nods at one another. Like a group of greasy-mouthed Winston Smiths stating their love of Big Brother, the restaurant is united and the previously critical older man stands up, raising a slice toward the last Soviet leader, to announce, “Hail to Gorbachev!” Everyone joins in and it builds into a rousing chant.

The commercial has floated around the internet for years, but it popped back up into view earlier this week when @zei_nabq tweeted it out again (along with Gorbachev’s equally fascinating Louis Vuitton ad.)

As an old CNN article explains, Gorbachev “agreed to do the commercial...only so that he could earn money” for his “library and a perestroika archive.” Somehow, despite the above video providing evidence otherwise, the former leader “would not have agreed to promote just anything,” but appeared in the Pizza Hut spot because “pizza is a special kind of food [that] does what he always wanted to do: It brings people together.”

“It’s an important part of life. It’s not only consumption, it’s also socializing,” he’s quoted as saying. “If I didn’t see that it was beneficial for people, I wouldn’t have agreed to it.”

Many have a less glowing opinion of this impressive rationalization for a pizza-based sell-out.

They might be onto something. Now, in 2019, we live in a world where the brands, and the corporations that they represent, possess a level of power that rivals that of any nation-state. America and Gorbachev ensured a less obvious form of mutually assured destruction when they agreed to the Pizza Hut ad, arming a new, extranational influence on geopolitics and global culture in the hopes of making money for their respective causes. At the end of the commercial, a babushka in black looks toward a grey horizon as the Pizza Hut chant rings out all around her. As pointed out by @alfred_Cloutier above, she’s the most striking figure in the commercial, thinking beyond pepperoni and mozzarella to gazing toward the strange, unsettling future we all live in now.

news.avclub.com/its-time-we-returned-to-this-pizza-hut-ad-starring-none-1837272733



Is capitalist propaganda that much of an improvement over communist propaganda? Especially when it whitewashes what was actually a very horrible decade for Russia?

(I've said it before, and I'll say it again -- the total mishandling of the USSR's collapse is exactly what paved the way for The Vlad to take over.)

[Tim]

Well, that was strange.  I've never heard of this commercial myself. 

[Squad 51]

I had a similar discussion back in Belarus (semester abroad). For us, Gorbachev is a hero but for the Russians not. It'd be weird if Krenz or someone else had appeared in a commercial spot. Scary thought!

The truth is, Gorbachev wanted a different socialism, yet not all communist states agreed with him, especially Honecker and the GDR. Krenz may have also wanted a different socialism but he used the wrong ways, so to speak.

[BettyNewbie]

It seems like Gorbachev wanted to reform the Soviet Union (and more slowly move it away from communism), only to get completely halted by Yeltsin:

Gorbachev was general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1985 until 1991. His policies of glasnost (“openness”) and perestroika (“restructuring”) helped end the Cold War, but they also took with it the Soviet Union, which proved unable to cope with the surge of anti-communism and nationalism that was unleashed.

The Soviet Union's death spiral reached its crescendo in December 1991, when Ukraine held a referendum in which 90 percent of voters favored independence. Within just a few weeks, all Soviet republics had agreed that the Soviet Union would be dissolved. The official announcement came on Russian TV on Dec. 21. Gorbachev resigned on Christmas Day, and the Soviet flag was taken down at the Kremlin.

The man who oversaw the collapse of the Soviet Union has had the past quarter-century to think about those events. Even now, he sounds bitter. “Behind our backs there was treachery, behind my back,” he said in his interview with the BBC. “They were burning down the whole house just to light a cigarette, just to get power. They couldn't get it through democratic means. So they committed a crime. It was a coup.”

While there was support for simply reforming the Soviet Union, Russian President Boris Yeltsin and his allies wanted to get rid of Gorbachev, he told the AP. “They were striving for power,” Gorbachev said. “It's bad when people are ill with that desire to grab power, to grab turf. It's impossible to build a democratic society with such people.”

As Soviet leader he could have used force to prevent the breakup, he said, but he believes it would have led to a bloody civil war, as the country was “loaded to the brim with weapons.” The West offered him no help, he said. “They were rubbing their hands in joy: The [Soviet] Union that had been a concern for decades ate up itself,” he said.

Gorbachev may well have a rose-tinted view of the Soviet Union, but many in Russia feel the same. Putin himself has cited the collapse of the union as the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century,” and under his leadership Russia has embraced some formerly shunned aspects of Soviet history. One recent poll from the independent Levada Center found that 56 percent of Russians regretted the collapse of the Soviet Union, while 28 percent did not.

www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/12/13/soviet-leader-gorbachev-says-a-new-union-could-rise-again/


While the West (especially the US) hails Yeltsin as a hero, it's not exactly the same case in Russia. It's actually a pretty ugly story, in fact:

A large majority of Russians, on the other hand, as they have regularly made clear in opinion surveys, regret the end of the Soviet Union, not because they pine for "communism" but because they lost a secure way of life. They do not share the nearly unanimous western view that the Soviet Union's "collapse" was "inevitable" because of inherent fatal defects. They believe instead, and for good reason, that three "subjective" factors broke it up: the way Gorbachev carried out his political and economic reforms; a power struggle in which Yeltsin overthrew the Soviet state in order to get rid of its president, Gorbachev; and property-seizing Soviet bureaucratic elites, the nomenklatura, who were more interested in "privatising" the state's enormous wealth in 1991 than in defending it. Most Russians, including even the imprisoned oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, therefore still see December 1991 as a "tragedy".

In addition, a growing number of Russian intellectuals have come to believe that something essential was lost - a historic opportunity to democratise and modernise Russia by methods more gradualist, consensual and less traumatic, and thus more fruitful and less costly, than those adopted after 1991.

One common post-Soviet myth, promoted by Yeltsin's supporters, is that the dissolution was "peaceful". In reality, ethnic civil wars erupted in central Asia and Transcaucasia, killing hundreds of thousands and brutally displacing even more, a process still under way.

It is hard to imagine a political act more extreme than abolishing what was still, for all its crises, a nuclear superpower state of 286 million citizens. And yet Yeltsin did it, as even his sympathisers acknowledged, in a way that was "neither legitimate nor democratic".

Having ended the Soviet state in a way that lacked legal or popular legitimacy - in a referendum nine months before, 76% had voted to preserve the union - the Yeltsin ruling group soon became fearful of real democracy. And indeed Yeltsin's armed overthrow of the Russian parliament soon followed.

...

Fearful for their dubiously acquired assets and even for their lives, the new property holders were as determined as Yeltsin to limit or reverse the parliamentary electoral democracy initiated by Gorbachev. In its place they strove to create a political system devoted to and corrupted by their wealth, at best a "managed" democracy. Hence their choice of Vladimir Putin, a vigorous man from the security services, to replace the enfeebled President Yeltsin in 1999. And uncertain how long they could actually retain their immense property, they were more interested in stripping its assets than investing in it. The result was an 80% decline in investment in Russia's economy by the end of the 1990s - and the nation's demodernisation. Given such a record, it is scarcely surprising that Putin's attempt to reassert state control over Russia's oil and gas industries is so popular.

So why did so many western commentators hail the breakup of the Soviet Union as a "breakthrough" to democracy? Their reaction was based mainly on anti-communist ideology and hopeful myths.

Yeltsin abolished the Soviet Union with the backing of the nomenklatura elites - pursuing the "smell of property like a beast after prey", as Yeltsin's chief minister put it - and an avowedly pro-democracy wing of the intelligentsia. Traditional enemies in the pre-Gorbachev Soviet system, they colluded in 1991 largely because the intelligentsia's radical market ideas seemed to justify nomenklatura privatisation.

But the most influential pro-Yeltsin intellectuals were neither coincidental fellow travellers nor real democrats. Since the late 1980s they had insisted that free-market economics and large-scale private property would have to be imposed on Russian society by an "iron hand" regime using "anti-democratic measures". Like the property-seeking elites, they saw Russia's newly elected legislatures as an obstacle. Admirers of Chile's Augusto Pinochet, they said of Yeltsin: "Let him be a dictator!" Not surprisingly, they cheered (along with the US government and mainstream media) when he used tanks to destroy Russia's popularly elected parliament in 1993.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2006/dec/13/comment.russia


Much has been said in recent years about Russia meddling in the 2016 election to help Orange Hitler win, but did you know that the US did the same thing to Russia 20 years earlier?

Americans Claim Role in Yeltsin Win


WASHINGTON — A team of American political strategists who helped Gov. Pete Wilson with his abortive presidential bid earlier this year said this week that they served as Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin’s secret campaign weapon in his comeback win over a Communist challenger.

And while some Muscovites are debating whether the Americans saved Yeltsin’s job or merely provided one voice among many working to revive the Russian president’s political chances, the consultants have now emerged to give interviews about how they quietly peddled advice to Yeltsin’s 36-year-old daughter and key advisor, Tatyana Dyachenko.

“I don’t have candidates generally who are as responsive as Boris Yeltsin,” said George Gorton, who worked for Wilson in 1994 and later ran Wilson’s abortive bid for the GOP nomination. “Certainly not Pete Wilson.”

Hired in February through a San Francisco firm with connections in Moscow, Gorton said that the team members never met Yeltsin. Instead, they sent their detailed, unsigned memos to his daughter. “We were told that we were formally retained as advisors to the Yeltsin family.”

Although the Americans spoke no Russian and worked through translators, they began secretly laying out an American-style campaign to counter the public sentiment running against Yeltsin.

When they started, Yeltsin’s approval rating was about 6%, and, as they told Time magazine, Josef Stalin had a higher positive rating in their polls. Yet last week, Yeltsin defeated Communist candidate Gennady A. Zyuganov by more than 13 percentage points.

*

In an interview here Monday, Gorton said that he and his colleagues quickly realized that Yeltsin did not trust his campaign advisors to help him win reelection and placed more value on the advice of his daughter.

“However, she didn’t know anything,” Gorton said. “She’s very bright, very articulate, very strong-willed, but she didn’t have the first idea about campaigning, not even the ideas that a child here would have.”

The Americans were brought in by a circuitous route. Felix Braynin of San Francisco, a Soviet immigrant who is now a wealthy consultant to American businesses working in Russia, began helping the Yeltsin campaign last year.

After he asked about American advisors who could help, San Francisco lawyer Fred Lowell suggested Gorton and Joe Shumate, an expert on political polling, and Richard Dresner, a political strategist who has helped not only Wilson but President Clinton in his earlier campaigns for governor of Arkansas.

The Americans will not say how much they were paid, although their fee has been estimated at about $250,000. They were told that their involvement had to be treated like a state secret because of fears that the Communists would use their presence to try to foment anti-Western sentiment among voters.

The group worked in hiding on the 11th floor of the Kremlin’s lavish President Hotel in downtown Moscow. The hotel can be entered by invitation only. After six weeks inside, Gorton and his colleagues began to sneak out for occasional meals in the city or to go into the countryside to help conduct some of Russia’s first focus groups.

“What you have to understand is that this hotel is a minimum-security prison masquerading as a five-star hotel,” said Steven Moore, a 28-year-old political consultant who joined in the effort.

The team is still secretive about some of its Russian business. Dresner prefers to stay mum about whether he was in touch with his old colleague Dick Morris, now Clinton’s chief campaign advisor. Citing certain “agreements” that they refuse to explain, Dresner and Gorton acknowledge only that information about their work was made available to the Clinton White House.

*

The American advisors also worked with the Russians on such details as replacing a poster of a scowling Yeltsin with a smiling version. They suggested that some negative ads needed to be more subtle--persuading the Yeltsin campaign to pull one poster that showed a hammer and sickle made of cockroaches.

Some of Yeltsin’s Russian advisors felt strongly that he could not criticize communism, especially since Communists had done so well in parliamentary elections in December and their leader, Zyuganov, was doing so well in the polls.

But Yeltsin followed the American advice until the last few days before the first round of balloting June 16, Gorton said. At that point, however, the Russian advisors canceled the anti-Communist ads. About the same time, Dresner said, Yeltsin’s campaign polls showed a flattening out.

But mostly, Yeltsin took their advice, the Americans said.

Perhaps the most troubling moment in their adventure came when it appeared some of Yeltsin’s advisors in the Kremlin were trying to convince him to cancel the election. At one point, the Americans believed that a Moscow pollster was handing out false numbers showing that Yeltsin could not possibly win.

“It came to the point that we wrote a memo I would never have written anywhere else. We said: ‘This campaign is in the bank. It’s over. It’s finished,’ ” Gorton said, meaning that Yeltsin had won.

www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-07-09-mn-22423-story.html

[Tim]

One common post-Soviet myth, promoted by Yeltsin's supporters, is that the dissolution was "peaceful". In reality, ethnic civil wars erupted in central Asia and Transcaucasia, killing hundreds of thousands and brutally displacing even more, a process still under way.

That's what happened following the collapse of the Western Roman Empire.  When a big power is sudden gone, chaos usually follows. 

I think that is why so many in Russia see Putin as a hero, even though he has become a de facto Tsar.  He put Russia back in the world stage and made everyone take it seriously again.

Much has been said in recent years about Russia meddling in the 2016 election to help Orange Hitler win, but did you know that the US did the same thing to Russia 20 years earlier?

Talk about history repeating itself!

[BettyNewbie]

Aug 17, 2019 17:08:06 GMT -5 Tim said:

Talk about history repeating itself!

The conspiracy theorist in me thinks that it may have been intentional payback from The Vlad. Remember that Orange Hitler's opponent was the wife of the president who had meddled with Russia's elections in 1996 (and was friends with Yeltsin).

It all makes sense now.

Aug 17, 2019 17:08:06 GMT -5 Tim said:

I think that is why so many in Russia see Putin as a hero, even though he has become a de facto Tsar.  He put Russia back in the world stage and made everyone take it seriously again.

Exactly.  It actually has many similarities to Hitler's rise in Germany following the failed Weimar Republic.  The weak, corrupt "democracy" of Yeltsin's era was unable to fill the void left by communism, so Russia started turning to hyper-nationalism and fascism as a solution -- aka. Putin.

In 2017, Putin officially became the longest-serving Russian leader since Stalin.  He is a dictator in all but name.

[Squad 51]

Before I began to study back in 1995, there was hope that under Yeltsin Russia would change and open up. My reason for studying Slavic studies, along with economics. With the year 2000, everything changed again as Putin came to power. And well, here we are.

As said, Gorbachev still is a hero for me since he didn't send tanks to oppress our demonstrations in 1989, starting in October.

[Tim]

And much of the former Warsaw Pact is now part of NATO. 

The conspiracy theorist in me thinks that it may have been intentional payback from The Vlad. Remember that Orange Hitler's opponent was the wife of the president who had meddled with Russia's elections in 1996 (and was friends with Yeltsin).

It all makes sense now.

Indeed it does. 

Wish we could dump both Orange Hitler and The Vlad down a black hole.

[Squad 51]

With Putin taking Crimea and his manovers in the Baltic region, all fear that we will be back to Soviet times. Putin is for sure working on it.

I'm glad that by now our democracy is stable, yet with the AfG we're certainly heading back to a time we'd rather forget.

[Tim]

Aug 18, 2019 8:00:34 GMT -5 Squad 51 said:

With Putin taking Crimea and his manovers in the Baltic region, all fear that we will be back to Soviet times. Putin is for sure working on it.

I'm glad that by now our democracy is stable, yet with the AfG we're certainly heading back to a time we'd rather forget.

The Baltic states are part of NATO now.  Putin knows that, and even he won't risk an all out war.

[Squad 51]

So, today is the big day! 30 years ago, late at night, the wall came down. I think, my family and I, we were just stunned and I can't remember if I stayed up long that night. I was 12!

[Tim]

I was stunned too, when I heard the news. 

This was truly the end of the Europe that emerged in 1945.

[Squad 51]

Unfortunately, the Eastern part had lived more than 40 years under a dictatorship. If you count the 12 years with Nazi Germany as well. Way too long, and many things still need to be discussed.

[Tim]

Yeah, the East right from Hitler to Stalin.  They hadn't had democracy since 1933!

I can see why so many had a hard time when the Wall fell.