Rostropovich Makes Triumphant Return to the Soviet Union : Music: The cellist, once branded a ‘renegade,’ will conduct concerts in the country he was exiled from 16 years ago.

Exiled from the Soviet Union more than a decade ago as an “ideological degenerate” and a “renegade to the motherland,” the renowned cellist Mstislav Rostropovich returned to Moscow this week unrepentant--and victorious.

“When we left, the Soviet Union was an island of lies, big lies,” Rostropovich said, recalling how he had gone abroad to work in 1974 and then been stripped of his Soviet citizenship four years later. “Now the Soviet Union is cleansing itself. . . . Our country is regaining its integrity, its honesty. It is now learning what truth is and what it means in life.”

Director of the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington since 1977, Rostropovich returned to Moscow on Sunday to conduct three concerts and play at a fourth after 16 years in painful, bitter exile. With him was his wife Galina Vishnevskaya, for 30 years a soprano at the Bolshoi Opera and even a more caustic critic than he of the Soviet government.

“When we were deprived of our citizenship in 1978, in those days that meant we would never come back, that we would never see our motherland, that we had been thrown out of our own home,” the fiery Vishnevskaya told a news conference at the government press center. “We thought we would never be able to see our country again.

“But the Soviet government has now recognized that barbaric act as unworthy of it. . . . We feel that we have been exonerated of all the accusations leveled against us.”

Rostropovich is the latest in a series of writers, musicians, artists and other cultural figures to return from exile, both forgiven and forgiving as President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s reforms change the cultural as well as the political landscape here.

In what already is one of the cultural events of the year, he will conduct the National Symphony tonight in Moscow and perform with it on Wednesday before going to Leningrad for two concerts later in the week.

Depicted in the Soviet press throughout the 1970s as a traitor to the motherland, Rostropovich and Vishnevskaya, a soprano of international standing, were accused of defaming the Soviet Union, becoming hirelings of Western propaganda and selling out all that was good and sacred in Russian culture.

Their first sin, in the view of Soviet officials, had been to shelter and defend Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn, who had won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1970 but become the fiercest critic of the Soviet regime. They had then compounded this by their own statements on the political, economic and social failures of the Soviet system.

Rostropovich and Vishnevskaya made clear on Monday that their views had only been confirmed by their long years abroad.

“Why is it that our long-suffering people, who lost so many lives in World War II and in the period of Stalin, live so poorly?” Rostropovich demanded, making clear that he believed the Soviet system was fatally flawed. “Why have the people suffered so much? . . .

“We count on the forces of renewal of the nation, that the people will be able to regain their strength and develop a bright future. . . . And we are praying to God Almighty that everything goes well, that there will be no bloodshed here and that people will live the way they deserve.”

Vishnevskaya scathingly criticized the continuing privileges for party officials here as not only corrupting but distancing them from real life.

“There must not be lines for the servants and others for the bosses,” she said. “Everyone must stand in the same line. Then those people who are in charge will feel quite well in their own skins what kind of life the Soviet Union has.

“But as long as the system exists when you can get sausage from it through the back-door--a special kind of sausage that is made especially for top leaders of the party--and for the people they make sausage that even a cat would not eat, they are living a different kind of life.”

And Rostropovich defended Solzhenitsyn, demanding that the Soviet government continue its rehabilitation of those who suffered for their views while the late President Leonid I. Brezhnev was the party leader here.

Solzhenitsyn would like to return, Rostropovich suggested, quoting the author as telling him just before this trip: “I will return to my people, of course, but I will come back only when every person has a chance of reading my books, buying them or borrowing them from libraries.”

Soviet culture minister Nikolai N. Gudenko responded with a promise to seek the restoration of the citizenship of all those who were forced overseas during the Brezhnev era and then lost their Soviet citizenship.

Still, Rostropovich himself was hopeful on the future of the Soviet Union, and like most other returning intellectuals and artists he praised President Mikhail S. Gorbachev and his political and economic reforms.

“Our only and our greatest wish and desire is that what is being discussed is put into practice,” Rostropovich said. “They speak wonderful words, now they must put all these ideas into specific actions. We are waiting for this, we are looking forward to it and, I think, so is the whole world.”

The return of Rostropovich and Vishnevskaya, the result of more than two years of behind-the-scenes diplomacy, some tough negotiations and a great deal of soul-searching here, was as emotional and tumultuous as only Russian homecomings can be.

The couple was mobbed at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport on their arrival, trailed to Novodevechye Cemetery where they paid their respects to the composer Dmitri Shostakovich and the violinist David Oistrakh, both of whom died during their exile, and were later mobbed, much like rock music stars, as they visited their apartment, met old friends and went about Moscow.

“This is a strange feeling to be back in my own country after so long,” Vishnevskaya said. “It is a country that meant everything to us but that we never thought we would see again.”