[WS:] I took the liberty of forwarding it to him. here is what he said:
I don't know if anybody cares about my opinion, but since I can't sleep here in Sevastopol I'll just say that if you had asked rossiyane 15 years ago during the time of troubles what they think of Gorbachev most of the answers would have been negative. However now (making allowances for different regions of the huge country and different social strata and ideologies and a differences between different age groups etc.), given that Russia's economy is now larger than that of the RSFSR at its height and this has been reflected in people's standards of living (making allowances for different regions etc.) most people consider perstroika to have been necessary and the majority of the population sees the dismantling of the USSR as either positive or unavoidable, his currency has raised from "he sucks" to "we have totally forgotten about him."
Things are different if you are talking about other former Soviet republics, in which (barring the Baltic States and Belarus) 1) living standards are much lower than in the RF 2) there are in several places strong ethnonationalist movements that hate Gorbachev because a) he's Russian and therefore automatically bad, b) tried to keep the USSR together and c) resorted to force to quell nationalist movements in the Baltics and Georgia and/or 3) there are ethnic Russian or other minorities that feel threatened by the majority ethnic group and so view the Soviet breakup as very bad (like here in Crimea), which interact as you would expect. Ukraine has all 3 of these at the same time.
Oh yeah, one other thing. As Michael has alluded too, perestroika was not begun by Gorbachev. It was begun by his mentor, Andropov, the guy that summoned Gorbachev to Moscow in the first place, and its origin was in the KGB, which had wanted reforms since the early 70s.
Christopher E. Doss Moscow, Russian Federation