WORLD : Gorbachev, Havel in Nobel Race

STOCKHOLM — Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev and Czechoslovak President Vaclav Havel, both symbols of political reform in Eastern Europe, are being mentioned as leading candidates for the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize to be announced Oct. 15.

African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela of South Africa and Chai Ling, a student activist in China’s pro-democracy movement last year, could also be in the running for the $700,000 prize, observers said.

According to Nobel sources in Oslo, President Bush, Pope John Paul II, German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher and Alexander Dubcek, leader of Czechoslovakia’s abortive 1968 reforms, are also being mentioned.

The 1990 Nobel season begins Monday when Sweden’s Karolinska Institute announces the winner of the medicine prize, one of five awards made annually under the will of Swedish philanthropist and dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel.