Kremlin fetes Gorbachev on his 80th birthday (Roundup)

Mar 2, 2011, 17:45 GMT

Moscow - The Kremlin feted former Soviet-era President Mikhail Gorbachev on his 80th birthday Wednesday, at the same time that Gorbachev took the opportunity to sharply criticize the country's top two leaders over human rights.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev awarded Gorbachev the country's highest state honours, praising the former leader as being one of the architects of German reunification.

This honour was 'adequate recognition for the work of a head of state,' Medvedev said.

Gorbachev had led the country during a very difficult, dramatic period, the Russian president noted.

Premier Vladimir Putin, in a briefly-worded congratulatory telegram, called Gorbachev an 'outstanding statesman of our times' who had had considerable influence on world history.

The faint praise from the two leaders were seen by many in Moscow as a reflection of the tensions between them and Gorbachev amid his criticisms of the human rights situation in Russia.

Gorbachev used the occasion of his birthday to criticize the situation again, specifically mentioning Medvedev and Putin by name in charging that under them there had been an 'attack on the freedoms and rights of the people,' according to Interfax.

'This is not acceptable,' said Gorbachev, who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990, a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the downfall of communism throughout Eastern Europe.

Gorbachev also said Russia still had huge social problems. Prices for food, medications and energy were rising without end.

'There's a lot of talk, but nothing happens,' he said.

But he also had words of praise for Russia reaching a new strategic arms reduction treaty with the United States, saying a life without nuclear weapons was possible and necessary.

Meanwhile the opinions inside Russia about the former Soviet leader, who tried to reform the Soviet communist system with his policies of 'glasnost' (openness) and 'perestroika' (restructuring) in the late 1980s, remained divided.

Twenty years since the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union and after Gorbachev left the political stage, historians and political scientists are still debating his role in history.

Communist Party leader Gennadi Syganov called Gorbachev a 'traitor' and 'destroyer' whose mistakes had ushered in the downfall of the Soviet Union.

Political scientist Vyatcheslav Nikonov noted about Gorbachev, 'he opened the floodgates to freedom.'

But Gorbachev's most serious mistake, Nikonov said, was holding firmly to the old communist planned economy system. China, for its part, has with its move towards a market economy shown the path that the Soviet Union could have gone, the university professor said.

On other occasions, Putin - who served in the KGB secret service during the Soviet era - has called the downfall of the Soviet Union the 'greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.'

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