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Gorbachev launches political party with Russian billionaire

The former Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, is to launch a new political party with a Russian billionaire, Alexander Lebedev.

Lebedev, a businessman and banker whose company, National Reserve Corps, controls more than 30% of the Russian national carrier, Aeroflot, announced the launch today and said the party would campaign for legal and economic reform.

Other policies are a stronger role for parliament, “less state capitalism” and the expansion of Russia’s independent media.

Lebedev and Gorbachev between them own 49% of the independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta, which employed the reporter Anna Politkovskya, a fierce critic of the Kremlin who was reknowned for exposing human rights abuses in the Chechen conflict. Her death in October 2006 was said to bear the hallmarks of a contract killing.

“I would call the new party project undoubtedly nonconformist, with one simple thought: We cannot develop further as a country without independent political institutions,” Lebedev told the Russian state news agency RIA-Novosti.

read the rest published by Guardian here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/sep/30/russia