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Mikhail Gorbachev, the Russian politician who initiated the Soviet Union’s transition from Communist superpower to quasi-democratic semi-superpower, hailed Margaret Thatcher in a column after her death on Monday, paying tribute to one of his chief diplomatic adversaries.

But unlike Thatcher and her American counterpart President Ronald Reagan, Gorbachev’s role in ending the Cold War brought him more derision than praise from his countrymen, many of whom blame him for bringing on a troubled decade where crony capitalism took hold and Russian global power was diminished. So it came as something of a surprise earlier in April when Gorbachev vigorously denounced Vladimir Putin’s crackdown on NGO’s and opposition activists in a speech at a state-run news agency, apparently intent on putting what little political capital he has left to use (before his deteriorating health makes it impossible).

Gorbachev invoked the catchphrase most closely identified with his tenure — “perestroika,” or restructuring — and urged the Putin-led government (and its United Russia Party) to reform a political system where the emphasis on stamping out dissenting voices has often seemed like the chief imperative for national leaders. But just as Gorbachev is more fondly remembered in the West (as the “reasonable” Soviet leader who saw the light, to speak) — with his columns regularly appearing in European newspapers, to boot! — he may lack the stature to have any kind of lasting impact on the domestic Russian political debate.

As one senior United Russia lawmaker told the New York Times, encapsulating the conventional wisdom in Moscow, Gorbachev brought on “…the worst possible result: the collapse of the country and gangster capitalism.”

Of course, it is more than a little ironic that the same party that has overseen a ballooning in the national income disparity between rich and poor (another issue Gorbachev raised in his speech) is bemoaning the rise of a few hundred massively wealthy Russian business elites at the expense of much of the rest of the country, but such are the counter-intuitive politics of an authoritarian democracy where opposition parties lack the legal protections (or public space) to make their grievances known. Indeed, the last time Gorbachev sought the presidency, in 1996, he won just 0.5 percent of the vote. Then again, the large protests against Putin’s return to the presidency last spring, which may enjoy a sequel of sorts in the coming weeks as opposition leader Alexey Navalny is put on trial, are indications that discontent is widespread, albeit confined to a minority of voters (with Putin’s approval rating hovering over the 60 percent mark).

Gorbachev’s invective might be more useful to those challenging Putin if he had left behind a functional political machine that held him up as its leader and hero, the way American Republicans do Reagan and Britain’s Conservatives (somewhat more ambivalently) do Thatcher. But the Communist Party of modern Russia, even if it made electoral gains in December 2011 by lambasting the nation’s economic trends, is ill-prepared to mount a challenge to Putin’s rule, one that in addition to enjoying wide public support also benefits from a cult of masculinity built around the former KGB officer. Besides, Gorbachev’s ties to that party are tenuous at best: he sought to form a new political vehicle in 2008 alongside billionaire Alexander Lebedev (an effort that quickly went nowhere).

Despite the fact that Gorbachev is enjoying another moment in the Western sun, as readers worldwide are curious over how this Russian reformer views the state of European politics after the death of his old adversary, his ability to shape his own nation’s future is looking rather close to nonexistent. The other great Cold Warriors may have died great, in other words, but the man with the world’s most famous birthmark is just fading away. The irony there — a reformer who died by his own reforms, so to speak — will not be lost on Putin.