Lenin's white statue seemed to gaze down expectantly on Mikhail Gorbachev as the Soviet leader walked to the podium of the Kremlin's Palace of Congresses, - opened a thick folder and began his 2-hr. 41-min. speech. Between Lenin and Gorbachev lay seven decades of Soviet history, much of it officially ignored or obfuscated -- and nearly all of it haunted by the ghost of Joseph Stalin. But Gorbachev had insisted there should be no "blank pages" in his country's past. Now, in an address marking the 70th anniversary of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, he had an ideal occasion to demonstrate the...
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