What a Pizza Hut ad says about Gorbachev - and Russia

Because the man in the black overcoat - the man, in effect, selling American pizza - is Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union. In the advert, a middle-aged man notices the former leader and exclaims: "It's Gorbachev!" before complaining: "Because of him, we have economic confusion." No-one can argue with that, and after a second's thought the middle-aged man, previously unhappy with Russia's economic chaos, stands up, raises his pizza slice in the air and exclaims: "Hail to Gorbachev!". Using Gorbachev as a source of conflict - and pizza as the unifier - was the idea of the advert's creators. "We were looking for some way to use Gorbachev... as a source of controversy, and let the pizza bring people together. At least they could agree that he had brought them pizza, and that was a good thing," one of the writers, Tom Derbyshire, told the BBC. Image source, Pizza Hut.

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