SOLZHENITSYN, ON BIRTHDAY, HAILED FOR TELLING THE TRUTH
Author: Associated Press
Date: Sunday, December 12, 1993
Page: 20
Section: NATIONAL/FOREIGN
MOSCOW -- President Boris N. Yeltsin sent a 75th birthday greeting
yesterday to author Alexander Solzhenitsyn and said he hoped to meet him soon
on Russian soil.
Yeltsin said that although Solzhenitsyn had suffered the hardship of war,
Soviet labor camps and exile, "nothing could deter you from your great mission
of telling the truth to the whole world."
Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag Archipelago" chronicled the harsh life in Soviet
prison camps during Communist rule. He was exiled from the Soviet Union in
1974 and accused of treason.
The 1970 Nobel Prize winner for literature lives in Cavendish, Vt. He was
rehabilitated during the glasnost years of President Mikhail S. Gorbachev and
said he plans to return to Russia in 1994.
Yeltsin praised Solzhenitsyn for having the courage to tell "the bitter and
terrible truth about your country and its people."
He said he hoped to meet Solzhenitsyn in the near future "on native Russian
land."
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