Decree Restores Citizenship to Soviet Exiles

President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, breaking further with the Kremlin human rights abuses of the past, ordered citizenship restored Wednesday to a large group of Soviet exiles and deportees, apparently including Nobel literature laureates Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Joseph Brodsky.

In a decree “eliminating” injustices committed in 1966-88--largely during the rule of Leonid I. Brezhnev that is now reviled as “the era of stagnation”--Gorbachev ordered Soviet diplomats to communicate the news to his countrymen who were banished or hounded from their homeland because of their views or outspokenness.

The exact number and identities of those whose citizenship was being restored was not immediately evident from the two-sentence decree, which was read on Soviet television’s evening news program “Vremya,” but Gorbachev was nonetheless hailed in influential human rights circles here.

“These people were deprived of their citizenship in line with a decree, but not in line with the law,” said Yelena Bonner, widow of human rights champion Andrei D. Sakharov. “Restoration of their legitimate rights is a good deed.”

There was immediate and furious speculation whether Solzhenitsyn, author of “The Gulag Archipelago” and “Cancer Ward,” would be among the beneficiaries of Gorbachev’s order, the latest in a series of presidential decrees redressing Soviet injustices, some dating to the rule of Josef Stalin.

Winner of the 1970 Nobel literature prize, Solzhenitsyn was expelled as a “traitor” four years later, and the return of the overtly anti-Communist writer who now lives in Cavendish, Vt., would be seen by many as irrefutable proof that Gorbachev’s openness policies now tolerate any dissent.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Yuri A. Gremitskikh, pressed at a news briefing to give details of the decree, commented that it “concerns a rather large number of people. Some names were mentioned--Solzhenitsyn, Brodsky.”

“I heard that ostensibly Mr. Solzhenitsyn had his Soviet citizenship restored, but I don’t know for sure,” Gremitskikh added, stressing that the information he was providing was unofficial.

But in a statement issued in her husband’s name from Vermont, Natalia Solzhenitsyn said: “In Solzhenitsyn’s case, the original decree was not only a deprivation of citizenship, but before that, a forced eviction from the U.S.S.R. that was accomplished through arrest and the accusation of treason. Since nothing has been said about that in today’s resolution, it does not apply to Solzhenitsyn.”

Even if the decree applies to Solzhenitsyn, he would not return to the Soviet Union because a condition of his return--that his writings be made widely accessible to his countrymen--has not been met by the Soviet government, according to a close acquaintance of the Solzhenitsyns.

Ludmilla Thorne, director of Soviet Studies at Freedom House in New York City, who spoke with Natalia Solzhenitsyn on the telephone Wednesday, said the writer’s wife responded, “Absolutely not,” when asked if his condition had been met. Solzhenitsyn has used Freedom House, a private human rights organization, as a conduit for many of his public statements.

Gremitskikh was also unable to say whether Gorbachev’s order restores citizenship to Soviet Jews who lost it when they emigrated to Israel.

Some highly placed officials were convinced that Solzhenitsyn, a Stalin-era prison camp inmate whose monumental “Gulag” painstakingly chronicles Soviet political repression and terror since the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, is being rehabilitated.

“I do not know who is on the list, but I am convinced that Solzhenitsyn must be one of them,” commented Russian Federation Information Minister Mikhail N. Poltoranin, speaking minutes after he learned of the decree.

Many of Solzhenitsyn’s works, including “Gulag,” are now in print in his homeland. In an interview last year with Time magazine, he said: “My return does not depend only on me. Soviet authorities have never yet rescinded the charge of treason that was lodged against me.”

Brodsky, born in Leningrad in 1940, was sentenced to five years imprisonment for “parasitism,” and eventually expelled in 1972. Since then, he has lived in New York. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1987.

As Brodsky was leaving the Soviet Union, he wrote a letter to Brezhnev that said: “Although I am losing my Soviet citizenship, I do not cease to be a Russian poet. I believe that I will return.”

Brodsky could not be reached for comment Wednesday.

The phrasing of Gorbachev’s order--it refers to restoring citizenship for a “group of people”--seemed to indicate that not everyone whose citizenship was terminated by a decree of the Supreme Soviet Presidium during the 22-year period would be affected.

Freedom House’s Thorn said the decree could re-establish the citizenship of Anatoly Koryagin, who condemned the political uses of Soviet psychiatry, poet Irina Ratushinskaya and a host of others now abroad.

Alexander Ginzberg, an exile now affiliated with the emigre newspaper Russkaya Mysl (Russian Thought) in Paris, said unconfirmed reports were circulating there that Gorbachev’s list includes two people now dead, Jewish bard Alexander Galich and Maj. Gen. Peter Grigorenko, who accused the Kremlin of concealing Stalin’s military blunders during World War II.