Mikhail Gorbachev had a ‘huge impact on world history’, says Vladimir Putin

Russian President Vladimir Putin has claimed that Mikhail Gorbachev had a “huge impact on the course of world history”, in a condolence telegram sent on Wednesday.

He added that the last Soviet leader “deeply understood that reforms were necessary” and strove to offer solutions to the problems faced by the Soviet Union in the 1980s.

Mr Gorbachev died in a Moscow hospital on Tuesday, aged 91.

The comments came after Mr Putin expressed his deepest condolences, according to Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, immediately following the announcement of his death.

The two Russian leaders clashed ideoligically, with one report claiming earlier this year that Mr Gorbachev believed his life’s work has been undone by Mr Putin.

Mr Putin, who has led Russia in some capacity for more than two decades, was serving as a KGB officer in what was then East Germany for much of Mr Gorbachev’s reign.

Though Mr Putin said he did not support the unsuccessful coup to remove Mr Gorbachev from office in 1991, much of his tenure has appeared aimed at reversing many of Mr Gorbachev’s policies.

Mr Putin considered the dissolution of the Soviet Union a humiliation, and has aggressively attempted to expand Russia’s influence and territory in Eastern Europe in recent years — a push that has culminated in the ongoing invasion of neighbouring Ukraine.

A number of American political leaders, including Senator Patrick Leahy and Rep Dean Phillips of Minnesota contrasted Mr Gorbachev with Mr Putin, with Mr Leahy saying that Mr Gorbachev “believed in a modern Russia and would never be the war criminal that Putin is.”

Boris Johnson, the British prime minister, wrote on Twitter that “in a time of Putin’s aggression in Ukraine, his tireless commitment to opening up Soviet society remains an example to us all.”

But Mr Gorbachev’s popularity in his native Russia did not nearly equal his popularity in the West.

A 2017 poll found that just 15 per cent of Russians held a favourable opinion of the final Soviet president, who was born into a peasant family of mixed Russian and Ukrainian heritage in the Stavropol Krai region of the Soviet Union.

The debate in Russia over Mr Gorbachev’s policy programme and legacy was a significant part of one of his most enduring cultural contributions: an advertisement for Pizza Hut in which customers who disagree about his politics are brought together in apprecitation for his having facilitated the chain’s arrival in Moscow.

In July, Pizza Hut’s parent company announced that it was leaving Russia and had sold its franchies there to another party due to Mr Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.