MOSCOW : Better Late Than Never

The Soviet Union’s acute political and economic crisis prevented him from going last December, when his Peace Prize was awarded. But after reaching agreements with most of the country’s republican leaders this spring on the future shape of the union, President Mikhail S. Gorbachev will finally deliver his Nobel lecture in Oslo on Wednesday.

Gorbachev has spent the last six months trying to achieve a measure of domestic political concord and thus recover lost leverage in Kremlin foreign policy--the area for which he won his prize.

Although his current foreign policy focus is on getting massive Western assistance to underwrite further reforms, Gorbachev may use the Nobel lecture to outline the next stage for his “new political thinking” in international relations.