The BBC reports:
The last leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, has given some of his strongest criticism yet of the politics of modern Russia. He says the United Russia party of the current Prime Minister, Vladimir Putin, behaves like the old-style Communists. “I criticise United Russia a lot,” said Mr Gorbachev, “I do it directly.” He also said Russia’s judicial system was not properly constitutional and dismissed members of its parliament as not truly independent. “United Russia is a party of bureaucrats,” he said, in an interview with the American news organisation, Associated Press. “It is the worst version of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.” Mr Gorbachev was speaking as the countries of Eastern and Central Europe look towards the 20th anniversary this year of the fall of Communism in Europe, as symbolised by the smashing of the Berlin wall.
The BBC correspondent in Moscow, James Rodgers, says that although Mr Gorbachev is respected throughout the world for his role in ending the Cold War, many Russians more readily associate him with the economic hardship that accompanied the end of Communism. Mr Gorbachev himself now says he did not foresee that his policies of openness and reform – “glasnost” and “perestroika” – would lead to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. “I was a resolute opponent of the break-up,” he said, expressing the hope that one day Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus might again re-join Russia in a political union.
La Russophobe 
Gorbachev like Solzenitsyn is no fan of a free and open democracy in Russia. He plays to the gullible the western press which is dumb enough to give him a platform. He’s a disappointment like all of the falling short and useless heros of Russia.
penny,
While you are right about Gorbachev – today he is one of the founders of Novaya Gazeta (look at LR’s slogan in the side bar). One of very few independent newspapers, and probably the largest among them.