“I’m in the process of creating a library and a perestroika archive, and this project requires certain funds,” Gorbachev said at the time. “Perestroika (restructuring) gave impetus to Russia and to the whole world.

“It is very important that everything that happened be preserved in these two centres.”

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Blamed for the collapse of the Soviet Union, his former allies had even begun deserting him and making him a scapegoat for the country’s troubles at the time of the advertisement’s filming.

“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.

The Louis Vuitton campaign

Gorbachev said he had knocked back other endorsements before agreeing to film the Pizza Hut ad. In 2007 he appeared in another campaign this time for the French luxury label Louis Vuitton.

Shot by photographer Annie Leibovitz, the campaign was based on travel, with Gorbachev featured in the backseat of a car with a Vuitton bag by his side and the Berlin Wall in the background.

That campaign was also not without incident.

Poking out of the designer bag was a magazine with the headline “Litvinenko’s murder: They wanted to give up the suspect for $7,000.”

That headline on the magazine, New Times - a liberal Russian publication that regularly criticises the Kremlin, was referencing Alexander V Litvinenko, a former KGB spy who died in November 2006 after being poisoned.

Litvinenko accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of orchestrating his murder.

The poisoning in London was one the first actions of aggression beyond Russia’s borders attributed to Putin’s leadership.

Louis Vuitton and ad agency Ogilvy & Mather however dismissed any significance of the magazine headline in their campaign.