Moscow - The Russian President, Mr Vladimir Putin, congratulated the last Soviet leader, Mr Mikhail Gorbachev, on his 70th birthday yesterday and thanked him for introducing an era of reform. "A whole epoch is rightfully linked to your name," Mr Putin told Gorbachev in a statement issued by the Kremlin. "It was an epoch in which deep changes were introduced to our country, that fundamentally transformed the political map of our country."
Recent opinion polls suggest that Mr Gorbachev's standing in Russia has improved - he was long reviled him as the man who broke up the Soviet Union. Banners furled across the streets of Moscow wished him a happy birthday.
