RUSSIA: Twenty years after ushering in the era of glasnost, former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev has returned to the political arena by bolstering his stake in one of Russia's few remaining independent news magazines.
He has announced a major cash injection into the weekly Novaya Gazeta, one of only a handful of Russian newspapers not controlled by the state.
"The press needs to be objective and independent," he said.
The move comes amid mounting criticism of the Kremlin's domination of the media: as well as controlling most national papers, the government controls all national TV stations.
Novaya Gazeta was founded with money Mr Gorbachev was given for winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990. Its high profile comes partly as a result of reports from Chechnya which have earned journalist Anna Politkovskaya international prizes.
Mr Gorbachev's own role in the newspaper has not been outlined. The former Soviet leader achieved fame for introducing glasnost, or "openness", into the Soviet Union, a process that is seen here as bringing about the collapse of the USSR in 1991.
Since then he has been a peripheral figure in Russian politics, blamed by many for the chaos of post-Soviet Russia. In 1996 he won just 1 per cent of votes in Russia's presidential election.
However, although praising President Vladimir Putin, he has also criticised his policies, most publicly in 2004 when he opposed the Kremlin's decision to scrap elections for the country's governors and appoint them centrally.
Mr Gorbachev says the upping of his ownership will provide the money to modernise presses, transform the paper into a daily publication and give it the resources to mount more high-profile investigations.
Novaya Gazeta editor Dmitry Muratov said the buy-up would not change the key dictum of his reporters to "say what they think". Mr Muratov said he is confident of his paper's independence because the journalists themselves would continue to own 51 per cent of the shares.
However, there are doubts about whether the paper can maintain its neutrality because Mr Gorbachev's partner and the source of the finance is billionaire MP Alexander Lebedev, who has ties to the Kremlin. While Mr Gorbachev owns 10 per cent of the shares, 39 per cent will be held by Mr Lebedev, a member of Mr Putin's United Russia party, which controls parliament and votes with the Kremlin.
The buy-up comes with the government under fire for its media policies. Earlier this week, Mr Putin was given a rough time when he attended the conference of the World Association of Newspapers held in Moscow.
Association president Gavin O'Reilly told Mr Putin that there was "widespread scepticism" about whether Russia had a strong independent media.
Meanwhile, Russian prosecutors have begun a criminal case against a journalist who labelled Mr Putin a "phallic symbol" of modern Russia.
Vladimir Rakhmanov says the criminal case, which carries a one year hard-labour sentence, is "retribution" for his earlier work in uncovering corruption in local government.