SOLZHENITSYN'S JOURNEY BACK
WRITER ENDS 20-YEAR EXILE, BUT HIS RECEPTION IS IN DOUBT

Author: By Fred Kaplan, Globe Staff

Date: Sunday, May 22, 1994
Page: 1
Section: NATIONAL/FOREIGN

In five days, Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn will set out in his time machine for what promises to be a similarly wrenching journey.

Solzhenitsyn, perhaps the most famous living writer, was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974 after his monumental book, "The Gulag Archipelago," was published in the West. After two years in Europe, he moved to Cavendish, Vt., where he has lived in exile 18 years.

On Friday, Solzhenitsyn, now 75, and his family will fly to the Far Eastern port of Vladivostok and work their way across seven time zones to Moscow. In the newspaper Izvestia last week, his wife, Natalia, described the trip as the fulfillment of his "destiny."

He has vowed not to run for office, but judging from his many interviews in recent months, he certainly intends to be a political voice.

The question, as argued out in the pages of several newspapers here, is whether, 20 years after leaving Russia -- which, given all its changes, would resemble 100 years after leaving most other countries -- his voice will carry much influence.

"If he had returned in 1985, he could have claimed a role as political leader. Now he's just late for the plane," said Alexander Minkin, a political columnist. "It will be very hard on the old man."

Solzhenitsyn's books no longer sell well here. His latest three-part historical novel, "Red Wheel," which he spent his entire exile writing, has not even been published in book form, appearing only as excerpts in journals. Even many of his admirers admit they could not finish it. "It's too long and too boring," said Natasha Perova, editor of the literary magazine Glas.

The journalist Grigori Amelin, in Nezavisimaya Gazeta, or the Independent Gazette, went further. "Who needs Solzhenitsyn? No one," he wrote, calling his trip "the return of a living relic to the mausoleum of all the Russias."

Yet Amelin's article inspired a full page of letters from citizens outraged at what they considered impertinence and convinced that Solzhenitsyn can be a moral compass for a nation desperately in need of one.

Russia has been so long without a moral figure -- arguably since December 1989, when physicist-dissident Andrei Sakharov died -- that nobody can say how Solzhenitsyn would play the role.

He would certainly be a stern, czar-like moralist. Sakharov, in his memoirs, noted that "even where I share Solzhenitsyn's general ideas, I often find troubling the peremptory nature of his judgments, the absence of nuance and his lack of tolerance for the opinions of others." His "idealization of the Russian national character and religion" is "not far removed from being slighting or hostile toward other peoples."

Yet Solzhenitsyn might have a better chance now atop this white horse than three years ago, when democracy was riding high and Russian nationalism had not yet reared its head.

In an interview with Forbes this month, Solzhenitsyn advocated pulling in parts of Kazakhstan and Ukraine into Russian territory. He attacked Western influence on Russia, "the filth of our spiritual atmosphere" that has been brought on by the import of "pornography, drug addiction, organized crime and new types of swindles."

He decried Russia's current regime as being indifferent to "the cruel poverty and hopelessness which has afflicted the majority of the population as a result of . . . technocratic reform -- after so many years of Communism, yet another heartless experiment performed on the unfortunate people of Russia."

Solzhenitsyn's brand of anti-Western nationalism could come to have more appeal than that of Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the ultranationalist politician whose party won more votes than any other in December's parliamentary elections. For his is a nationalism with less of the imperialism that repels many from Zhirinovsky, whom he calls "an evil caricature of a Russian patriot."

Solzhenitsyn wants no part of the war in former Yugoslavia -- "I am an opponent of pan-Slavism," he told Forbes -- or of foreign interventions anywhere. He would also prefer to let go of the Trans-Caucasus and much of Central Asia.

No doubt, Russia's leading politicians are already engraving their dinner
invitations to Solzhenitsyn. They will all try to recruit him to their causes, Minkin said, if for no other reason than to have him as "a fancy table decoration."

However, as Natalia Solzhenitsyn told Izvestia, her husband is "not planning on joining any side." Indeed, his perpetual dissent from all causes and regimes will likely serve as his best body armor amid the savage political wars of Moscow.

Ever since he left the Red Army as a young man, Solzhenitsyn has spent his life preaching against the establishment. As a writer struggling in the Soviet Union, he bore his way like a cancer into its rigid structures, carefully plotting a course to topple Communism and restore Russia to what he saw as its spiritual roots.

When Leonid Brezhnev finally decided to boot Solzhenitsyn from Moscow in February 1974, it was because the cancer had spread too deeply -- the ruling Politburo believed Solzhenitsyn represented a serious threat to the system itself.

In America of the 1970s and '80s, Solzhenitsyn took up battle against what he saw as the decadence and moral bankruptcy of the West, preaching against television, pornography, atheism and modernism.

So it should be no surprise that he is coming home, already expressing disdain for what awaits him.

Because of the intensity of his recent invective, many here are convinced Solzhenitsyn might step into the role of a one-man opposition figure to all power and would-be power circles of post-Soviet Russia. The question is whether the Russian people will embrace, reject or simply nod off at his raspy lectures.

His campaign may begin the moment he touches down in Vladivostok. When he was exiled, it was a closed military city, stuck in the middle of nowhere, a place where the Russian spirit was embedded in the lives of the isolated population. Now, the city is packed with Sushi bars, $250-a-night hotels and Mafia-run casinos. He will see kiosks that just a few years ago sold great works of literature -- including his -- now peddling beer, Snickers bars and Vietnamese condoms.

In Moscow, the chaos has already affected him intimately. Work on the family dacha, being built northwest of town, has been stopped since January
because of sloppy construction. The family will have to start out with their more than 400 boxes of books, letters and manuscripts in a five-room apartment in downtown Moscow that they bought earlier this year, even though Solzhenitsyn has said he does not want to live in the city.

Still, Natalia Solzhenitsyn said last week, "We completely clearly understand . . . that huge difficulties await us."

Whatever the circumstances, Alexander Solzhenitsyn will go back to what he's been doing for most of his life -- using his pen and voice to try to reform a system that he believes must be set straight.

Education: Studied physics and mathematics, Rostov University.

Family: wife, Natalia Svetlova; three sons.

1941: Became a Soviet army officer.

1945: Condemned to eight years' detention for criticism of Stalin.

1950: Worked in Kazakhstan labor camps.

1952: Stricken with cancer.

1962: Gained fame with the publication of "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich."

1970: Awarded Nobel Prize in Literature.

1974: "The Gulag Archipelago" published in Paris.

1976: Settled on a 50-acre estate near Cavendish, Vt.

SOURCE: Reuters

Compiled by Maria Tenaglia

AUERBA;05/21 NIGRO ;05/24,07:59 SOLZHE22