Moscow - Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev is planning the launch of new Russian political party with the support of billionaire and former KGB officer Aleksander Lebedev, Vedomosti newspaper reported Tuesday.

The new political grouping named the Independent Democratic Party (IDP) will aim at putting candidates into parliament in Russia's 2011 elections.

The IDP's main platform will be the development of independent state and social institutions and particularly a national television broadcaster that would not take orders from the government, Vedemosti reported.

Lebedev confirmed the plan's existence in an interview.

Kremlin opponents criticized the "political project," as new political campaigns are often considered yet another split in the country's weak opposition to a government and state tightly- controlled by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and his allies.

Russian politician Boris Nemtsov, leader of a centre-right party failing to reach parliament in the last elections, said a functioning IDP party led by Gorbachev would be a "great disadvantage" for the development of democracy in Russia for precisely this reason.

Aleksei Malashchenko, a political analyst from the Moscow-based Carnegie Centre, was skeptical of the IDP's chances, noting that Gorbachev in cooperation with Russia's weak Social Democratic movement has attempted without success to bring a new political party into being several times since the Soviet Union's implosion.

The Russian electorate and therefore the national legislature has "hardly any room for such an initiative," Malashchenko said.

Lebedev, 48, and Gorbachev, 77, are already partners in operating the Novaya Gazeta newspaper, one of Russia's few Kremlin-critical publications. The newspaper employed among other independent journalists award-winning Chechen war report Anna Politkovskaya until her October 2006 gangland murder.

A Nobel Peace Prize recipient, Gorbachev is held in generally high regard abroad, but has been pilloried at home for allowing the break-up of the Soviet Union and Russia's disastrous economic and political course during the 1990s. (dpa)