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Gorbachev says Russia needs new political party
November 24, 2001
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev offered fresh support for President Vladimir Putin on Saturday, but told a new political party that Russia needed to find a way between capitalism and socialism.
Gorbachev, 70, who resigned as Soviet leader 10 years ago next month, was addressing the founding congress of the Social Democratic Party which brings together his own United Social Democratic Party with another social democratic grouping run by a prominent regional leader.
"Putin's activity, with all its successes and flaws, is directed towards national interests, the interests of all Russians, and I'd say he has done even more than I expected," Gorbachev said in his address, reported by television and news agencies.
But he said the new party's support for the Kremlin leader was "not unreserved, unprincipled or unconditional".
Gorbachev heads a foundation with plush Moscow offices and spends much of his time at speaking engagements abroad.
But he has fared badly in political terms since resigning on Christmas Day 1991, less than three weeks after the leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus proclaimed the Soviet Union dead and left in its place more than a dozen sovereign states.
Gorbachev ran against Russian President Boris Yeltsin in the 1996 presidential election, but took less than one percent of the vote. Voters jeered him, blaming him for the collapse of Soviet rule, their lost savings and a plunge in living standards.
His endorsement of social democratic candidates in the 1999 parliament elections had little effect and he founded his own party last year. He later agreed to merge it with a party led by Konstantin Titov, governor of Samara region on the Volga River.
But Russia's liberals remain split. Heads of two other social democratic groups, among several with tiny percentages in opinion polls, were absent from Saturday's congress.
"While the left believes the rule of capital is absolutely evil and the right believes it is the final aim of history, Social Democrats occupy a position of compromise," Gorbachev said. "They are not against capital, but against wild capitalism."
The party was to choose its leadership later on Saturday, with Gorbachev and Titov likely to secure the top spots.
Among the guests at the congress, curiously, was nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky.
"Perhaps we have found in each other allies for the future," he told the gathering.
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