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Moscow: Mikhail Gorbachev is making an unlikely political comeback almost 17 years after stepping down as the Soviet Union's last leader.
The author of Glasnost and Perestroika, now 77, said that that he and his business partner Alexander Lebedev, a maverick ex-KGB officer turned billionaire banker, would form a political party to contest parliamentary elections in 2011.
While Gorbachev has championed freedom of speech, he has conspicuously avoided direct criticism of Vladimir Putin, the Russian prime minister.
Yet he and Lebedev described the Independent Democratic Party of Russia, the working title of the new movement, as an opposition group. The Russian parliament, the State Duma, has three opposition parties but two are thought to be creations of the Kremlin. The third, the Communist Party, rarely opposes the government on issues of substance.
By his own admission, Lebedev says his party would be the "polite" opposition, eschewing the firebrand tactics of former chess champion Garry Kasparov's The Other Russia movement, which was banned from contesting last year's parliamentary election. But he insisted that his party would be prepared to criticise Putin when necessary. "Even if I'm polite and politically correct, it's absolutely clear that there are things on which we disagree," he said.
Gorbachev is more likely to play a role as elder statesman in the party, but Lebedev could emerge as its leader. He sits in the Duma with a Kremlin-created opposition party, A Just Russia.
However, he is prepared to list things that he believes Putin got wrong in his eight years as president and which his party will seek to reverse. The focus is likely to be in the financial sphere, where he accused the government of failing to improve infrastructure and spending too much on defence. "Our economic policy is rubbish," he said.
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