THOUSANDS OF SOVIET EXILES HAVE CITIZENSHIP RESTORED

Author: By Charles A. Radin, Globe Staff

Date: Thursday, August 16, 1990
Page: 1
Section: NATIONAL/FOREIGN

Both writers are winners of the Nobel Prize in literature.

It was Gorbachev's second major human rights decree in three days. On Monday, he ordered the rehabilitation of millions of people killed and jailed under Joseph Stalin. The decrees were the latest step in "perestroika," Gorbachev's campaign to restructure and modernize Soviet society.

Though they are fellow exiles and prize winners, the two authors are otherwise largely opposites. Solzhenitsyn, the dominant Russian writer of recent decades, won the prize in 1970, and was expelled four years later, when the authorities decided his continuous challenge to the essence of communism could no longer be tolerated. He has spent the intervening years in seclusion on an estate in Cavendish, Vt.

Brodsky, the Soviet Union's premier poet, was expelled in 1972 and won the prize three years ago. He lives in New York City, is poet in residence for the University of Michigan and is intensely active in Western literary affairs.

Solzhenitsyn and Brodsky contrast similarly in their orientation toward their home country, with Solzhenitsyn intent on continuing to confront communist power while Brodsky has turned his back on it.

Tass, the Soviet news agency, circulated a two-paragraph dispatch saying, ''Continuing the work on undoing injustice to people deprived of Soviet citizenship between 1966 and 1988, the USSR president repealed decrees adopted by the presidium of the Supreme Soviet on stripping of Soviet citizenship a number of people living abroad at the present time."

Tass director Leonid Kravchenko told reporters that Gorbachev's order clearly applied to Solzhenitsyn, Brodsky and other leading exiles.

"The decree applies to all who were" exiled "within the period cited," United Press International quoted Kravchenko as saying. "The dates are mentioned. All those who are within that period can be considered as having their citizenship restored. This is applied to all names . . . the names well known in the literary world, and Solzhenitsyn must be among them." However, no list as such was released.

In a statement issued in her husband's name from Vermont, Natalia Solzhenitsyn said: "In Solzhenitsyn's case, the original decree was not only a deprivation of citizenship, but before that a forced eviction from the USSR that was accomplished through arrest and the accusation of treason. Since nothing has been said about that in today's resolution, it does not apply to Solzhenitsyn."

Brodsky was not immediately available for comment.

Restoration of citizenship to such a large group, and to individuals as different as Solzhenitsyn and Brodsky, underscores that the changes taking place in the Soviet Union are general and nonideological, observers said yesterday. Many said there was no longer much surprising or exciting in such developments.

"It's a continuation of the whole process of becoming a part of the modern world," said Marshall Goldman of Wellesley College, a specialist in Soviet affairs. "It is turning the back of the Soviet government on the dark days not only of the 1930s," the peak period of Stalinist purges, "but on the 1950s and 1960s and 1970s.

"At this point it is almost not sensational," Goldman said. "It is nice to see what's happening, but in all respects, economically, on the Iraqi thing, the Soviets are behaving like any ally. We don't agree with them on everything, but we don't agree with the Canadians or the French on everything either."

Adam Ulam, director of Harvard's Russian Research Center, said that while the restoration of such people was "inevitable, if anything overdue, at the same time only a year ago the then-ideological secretary of the Communist Party said that Solzhenitsyn's works would not all be published."

Publication of his works and restoration of his citizenship have been the two principal conditions set down by Solzhenitsyn for returning to the Soviet Union. Over the past year, general publication of his works has begun. Now Gorbachev has addressed the second demand.

Solzhenitsyn was shown on Moscow television recently, for the first time since he was sent into exile. Three days ago, a nine-year-old interview with French television was broadcast, in which the 71-year-old Solzhenitsyn said he ''always expected to be buried on Russian soil" and expected his three sons to return.

Ulam said Gorbachev's action "at a time when there is considerable trouble in the Soviet Union as to the basic shape of the country" indicates that Gorbachev "wants as much reconciliation and chasing away of the last remnants of Stalinism as possible."

Neither Solzhenitsyn nor Brodsky would be expected to take a direct role in politics.

Solzhenitsyn stands for the elimination of communism and the establishment of religious freedom, but he has been extremely private in his life in Vermont, giving only one interview in recent years, and that one on condition he not be asked about changes in the Soviet Union. He writes strictly about earlier times.

Brodsky, a full citizen of the Western academy of letters, eschews the honor and respect paid to men of such dissident pasts, but writes lyrically of what change means to him. For example, he has written the following:

Freedom:

Is when you forget the spelling of the tyrant's name

And your mouth's saliva is sweeter than Persian pie,

And though your brain is wrung tight as the horn of a ram

Nothing drops from your pale-blue eye.

RADIN ;08/15 NIGRO ;08/16,11:57 SOVIET16