FIRST OFF . . .

The spirit of glasnost continues as avant-garde Soviet director Yuri Lyubimov, who moved abroad in 1984 after being fired and ousted from the Communist Party, has had his citizenship restored, Tass said Tuesday. Lyubimov, 71, returned briefly to the Soviet Union a year ago at the invitation of the government, which said it was acting in the spirit of social and economic reforms by President Mikhail S. Gorbachev. The artistic director of Moscow’s Taganka theater for nearly 20 years, Lyubimov was fired in 1984 and stripped of his citizenship. Since then, he had lived and worked in France and Israel, and spent some time in the United States, staging Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment” in 1987. But he had said he wanted to return to the Soviet Union to direct in his native Russian language. He returned to the Soviet Union in January and has been directing plays at the Taganka, the experimental theater where he had staged avant-garde productions that provoked harassment and hostility from censors. He is working in Moscow on a play about village life, titled “Alive,” a play banned 20 years ago, Tass said.