The World - News from Sept. 16, 1988

Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev drew himself symbolically closer to V. I. Lenin, the founder of the Soviet state, visiting the Siberian village where Lenin was exiled by the czarist government from 1897 to 1900 and comparing his own reforms to those of the Bolshevik leader. In an interview outside the Lenin Museum in Shushenskoye, Gorbachev noted that Lenin made sharp changes in course when he pulled Russia out of World War I, then instituted the government’s New Economic Policy in the 1920s. “We need that kind of turn, in its scope and it its fateful consequences,” he said.