SOLZHENITSYN PLANS TO END VERMONT EXILE WITHIN DAYS
Author: Associated Press
Date: Wednesday, May 18, 1994
Page: 19
Section: NATIONAL/FOREIGN
MOSCOW -- Alexander Solzhenitsyn has obtained a Russian passport and will
return to Russia in the next two weeks, ending 20 years of exile, his wife
said in an interview published yesterday.
The red brick home being built for him overlooking the Moscow River is
still not ready, so Solzhenitsyn and his family will move into a Moscow
apartment temporarily, Natalia Solzhenitsyn told the daily Izvestia.
Solzhenitsyn, who left the Soviet Union in handcuffs and under KGB guard in
1974, plans to travel extensively in Russia upon his return, his wife said.
The family has packed 400 boxes with his immense library and archives, she
said. The material includes memoirs of Russians scattered around the world and
accounts of those who witnessed World War I, the Russian civil war, Stalin's
brutal collectivization, and World War II.
The only furniture the family will ship is Solzhenitsyn's desk, she told
Izvestia in a telephone interview from their home in Cavendish, Vt.
Mrs. Solzhenitsyn, who became an American citizen during her exile, said
her husband would travel on a Russian passport he recently received from the
Russian Embassy in Washington. Solzhenitsyn is not a US citizen.
The country's former Communist rulers stripped Solzhenitsyn of his Soviet
citizenship and branded him a traitor for exposing the police state and its
network of labor camps in "The Gulag Archipelago," "One Day in the Life of
Ivan Denisovich" and other works. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature
in 1970.
His citizenship was restored in 1990 under President Mikhail S.
Gorbachev's rule.
Solzhenitsyn, 75, has said he plans to continue writing and will stay out
of daily Russian politics.
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