IF ANY CITY DESERVES TO BE called the mausoleum of Soviet communism, it is Ulyanovsk, the industrial center on the Volga where Vladimir Lenin, ne Ulyanov, was born in 1870. It contains a varied assortment of Lenin shrines, from his parents' apartments to his classroom to a modernistic museum complex on a bluff overlooking the river. The city is so resistant to political and economic reform that some Russians refer to it as a "communist preserve." It has been ruled since 1990, except for a brief interval, by its "Red Governor," Yuri Goryachev, who was once First Secretary of the region's...
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