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By Mark Simp­son (Arena Hommes Plus, Win­ter 2007)

Is it… him? Is it really the man who ended the Cold War? The man who brought down the Berlin Wall — the human face of Soviet Com­mu­nism, the last face of Soviet Com­mu­nism? Is he still alive? What in Lenin’s name is he doing in an ad for designer lug­gage? Is that his bag, or is it Raisa’s? Why is he appar­ently about to jump out of a mov­ing car? And how much did he get?

So many ques­tions assail you on see­ing the ad for Louis Vuit­ton (shot by the power-lens of Annie Lei­bovitz) with the famously soberly-dressed Mikhail Gor­bachev in the back of a Khrushchev-era lim­ou­sine slid­ing past a rem­nant of the Berlin Wall, it’s dif­fi­cult to decide whether the image is very smart or very funny, lib­er­at­ing or ter­ri­fy­ing. Was the ‘End of His­tory’ really just a photo-op for lux­ury lug­gage? Was Per­e­stroika about mak­ing the world safe for Louis Vuit­ton? Well, perhaps.

Wealthy Rus­sians keen to make a state­ment are a fast-growing mar­ket for lux­ury goods such as LV, both in Mother Rus­sia and abroad: A jour­ney brings us face to face with our­selves, as the strapline to the ad puts it. What­ever Rus­sians them­selves may think of the old appa­ratchik, Gorbachev’s face, heavy with his­tory and tragedy, is the face that launched the new, pas­sion­ately con­sumerist Russia.

Oh, and the bag is Gorby’s not Raisa’s. LV are keen for more men to buy their prod­ucts — prod­ucts they have decided should be depicted in their ads not as ‘heroes’ them­selves, as is cus­tom­ary in fash­ion and lux­ury adver­tis­ing, but as ‘com­pan­ions on the jour­ney’. So the bag might even in some uncon­scious way stand in for this hero’s famously glam­orous wife — who, alas, died from leukemia in 1999.

How much was Gor­bachev paid? This infor­ma­tion is dis­cretely unavail­able — though LV acknowl­edge they made a dona­tion to his Green Cross Inter­na­tional envi­ron­men­tal charity.

One thing we can be cer­tain of: Gorby, a decent man who tried to do the decent thing, was paid con­sid­er­ably less for his ser­vices than his arch-rival and bul­ly­ing, drunken suc­ces­sor Yeltsin was for break­ing up the Soviet Union and sign­ing over Russia’s hard-gained indus­trial wealth to Western-backed oligarchs.

Per­haps that is the real mean­ing of the image: Gor­bachev is trav­el­ling back from Yeltsin’s funeral, into pos­ter­ity — with a nice bag to keep his 1990 Nobel Peace Prize in.

Copy­right Mark Simp­son 2007