Mikhail Gorbachev will celebrate his 75th birthday Thursday by throwing a party for his old Politburo colleagues, former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, relatives and schoolmates.

The former Soviet president invited 200 to 250 guests to dinner at a Moscow restaurant, "the ones that he would really be pleased to see," said his spokesman, Vladimir Polyakov. He declined to name the restaurant.

Kohl`s former deputy and foreign minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, will also attend, Polyakov said.

Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was invited but didn`t feel well enough for the trip, while former U.S. President George H.W. Bush couldn`t come but sent videotaped congratulations, Polyakov said.

The guests will include former Politburo member Vadim Medvedev and Gorbachev`s former aide on foreign affairs, Anatoly Chernyayev.

Gorbachev also invited his relatives, schoolmates and university friends from the Stavropol area, where he was born and grew up.

The architect of the policy of perestroika, which brought an end to the Cold War and led to the collapse of the Soviet Union, Gorbachev now heads the Gorbachev Foundation, a Moscow think tank, and Green Cross International, a Geneva-based environmental organization.

In honor of Gorbachev`s birthday, Bolshoi Theater ballet dancers and the country`s leading classical singers and pianists on Tuesday gave a charity concert at the Moscow International House of Music to raise money for a children`s medical center that the Gorbachev Foundation constructed in St. Petersburg but has yet to equip. Gorbachev named the hematology and transplant center there after his wife, Raisa Gorbacheva, who died of leukemia in 1999.

Gorbachev joined the Communist Party in 1952, one year before Stalin`s death. In an interview with Rossiiskaya Gazeta published Wednesday, Gorbachev said he was shocked when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev condemned Stalin`s cult of personality.

"I believed in communism, believed in Stalin, wrote a [school] essay: `Stalin is our combat glory. Stalin is the inspiration of our youth,`" Gorbachev said.

According to a poll released Monday by the state-controlled polling agency VTsIOM, 53 percent of Russians still blame Gorbachev for the breakup of the Soviet Union. Only 19 percent of respondents said they respected or liked Gorbachev, while 36 percent said they were indifferent.

Gorbachev regularly speaks on current domestic and international issues. During a conference at his foundation Wednesday, he called on the West to respect Islamic nations and their interests.
sections: Society, Region News
areas: Central region