Soviet Composers Union Reinstates Rostropovich

The Soviet Composers Union announced Wednesday that Mstislav Rostropovich, the expatriate Russian cellist and conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, has been reinstated as a member of the union in what appeared to be a prelude to his full political rehabilitation and an invitation to return .

Rostropovich is the latest in a series of distinguished Russian artists, writers, musicians and dancers who emigrated or were expelled from the country in the 1960s and 1970s and who are being rehabilitated and, in some cases, invited back. Rostropovich expressed doubt last year that he would be included. He could not be immediately reached for comment Wednesday.

Ballerina Natalia Makarova, who defected in 1970, returned to dance with the Kirov Ballet in Leningrad this month. Director Yuri Lyubimov has been invited back to Moscow’s Taganka Theater, which he once headed. Rudolf Nureyev and Mikhail Baryshnikov have returned on family visits. Writer Andrei Sinyavsky returned for a visit last month in connection with the death of his friend Yuli Daniel. Poet Joseph Brodsky, another Nobel Prize winner, is published regularly here.

In 1978, while in the United States on a concert tour, Rostropovich and his wife, Galina Vishnevskaya, the opera singer, were accused of “unpatriotic activities defaming the Soviet system” and “assisting subversive anti-Soviet centers,” stripped of their Soviet citizenship, national awards and honorary titles and expelled from the composers union. Although world famous as a cellist, he quickly became a non-person here.

His name was removed from musical manuscripts and books, from archival material at the Moscow Conservatory, where he taught, and Tchaikovsky Hall, where he performed.

His principal crime, in the eyes of the Soviet leadership at the time, was his defense of Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn, the Russian novelist who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970. Not only did Solzhenitsyn live in Rostropovich’s country house, but Rostropovich spoke out forcefully against the government campaign that eventually led to the writer’s expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1974.