An Ailing Gorbachev Makes a Fierce Attack on Putin and His Restrictions

 Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the first and last president of the Soviet Union, now 82 and increasingly frail, may have needed a helping hand to climb on stage for a speech at the state-run RIA-Novosti news agency. Oratorically, however, he seemed nimble enough, delivering a sharp poke in the gut to President Vladimir V. Putin and the Kremlin.

“Politics is more and more turning into an imitation,” Mr. Gorbachev said. “All power is in the hands of the executive. The Parliament only seals its decisions. Judicial power is not independent. The economy is monopolized, hooked to the oil and gas needle. Entrepreneurs’ initiative is curbed. Small and medium businesses face huge barriers.”

Mr. Gorbachev, invoking “perestroika” — the Russian word for “restructuring” and the brand name of his reforms that brought about the fall of communism and helped him win the Nobel Peace Prize — called for yet another renewal of the Russian political system.

His prepared speech, posted later on the Internet, was even tougher than the remarks he delivered. In it, he wrote that by curtailing freedoms and tightening restrictions on civil society groups and the press, Mr. Putin had adopted “a ruinous and hopeless path.”

While he is still revered in the West for his role in ending the cold war, Mr. Gorbachev has largely faded into insignificance in Russia. He is remembered far more for the chaos and deprivation of the 1990s that followed him than for delivering the citizens of the Soviet Union from tyranny.

Nonetheless, his speech, made on Saturday as he briefly ventured from a Moscow hospital where he is undergoing a lengthy checkup, quickly drew angry and dismissive responses from the Kremlin.

“We have had enough restructuring,” said Mr. Putin’s spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov.

Sergei Neverov, the deputy speaker of the lower house of Parliament and a leader of United Russia, the party that nominated Mr. Putin for president, said, “Mikhail Sergeyevich has already been the initiator of one perestroika, and as a result we lost the country.”

Mr. Neverov defended the policies of Mr. Putin and United Russia, which he said “helped us to preserve the state, to solve the problem of poverty and to stop the criminals trying to grab power.”

Aleksei Pushkov, a member of United Russia and chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the lower house, similarly rejected Mr. Gorbachev’s objections by criticizing Mr. Gorbachev. “The cost of a painful process, the cost of huge losses from a major transformation of our country has already occurred,” Mr. Pushkov told the Interfax news agency.

In the wake of the Soviet Union’s dissolution, he said, “it was the worst possible result: the collapse of the country and gangster capitalism.”

Mr. Gorbachev, in an interview with the BBC in early March, made similarly harsh remarks about Mr. Putin’s government, saying it was replete with “thieves and corrupt officials,” and he offered a harsh assessment of laws recently adopted in Russia clamping down on nongovernmental organizations.

“The common thread running through all of them is an attack on the rights of citizens,” he said in that interview. “For goodness sake, you shouldn’t be afraid of your own people.”

In the BBC interview, Mr. Gorbachev also defended himself. “I’m often accused of giving away Central and Eastern Europe. But who did I give it to? I gave Poland, for example, back to the Poles. Who else does it belong to?”

In his speech at RIA-Novosti, Mr. Gorbachev acknowledged that he was not well. “Now, I am seriously sick,” he said. He appeared to have gained a substantial amount of weight, and he had trouble both reading from his text and, later, hearing questions.

Never known as an eloquent speaker, he stumbled over some words, and at times seemed a bit disoriented.

In his remarks, Mr. Gorbachev allowed that Mr. Putin’s government had beaten back a rising political opposition movement in Moscow. “They managed to put down the wave of protests for some time,” he said. “But the problems of the country have not gone away.”

Specifically, he pointed to widening income disparity and corruption. “The gap in incomes and living standards between the small mostly well-to-do stratum of the population and all the rest is unacceptably high,” Mr. Gorbachev said. “Corruption has acquired a colossal scope.”