Russia Invites Solzhenitsyn to Return Home

The prime minister of the Russian federation on Saturday made a personal plea to novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn to come home from exile as his guest, calling his return as necessary “as air to our homeland.”

The prime minister, Ivan S. Silayev, issued the invitation in a letter that was printed in the daily Sovietskaya Rossiya. He called the Nobel laureate, who was arrested and forced out of the country by the KGB secret police in 1974, “a great son of the Russian people.”

“It is the very interests of the state, of its long-term well-being which call on me to ask you and your family to accept this invitation to be my personal guest at any time you choose,” Silayev wrote. “Your return to Russia would, in my opinion, be an act as necessary as air to our homeland.”

Solzhenitsyn, the author of the horrifying prison-camp epic, “The Gulag Archipelago,” had his citizenship restored along with that of 22 other exiles under a decree issued by Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev on Wednesday. Gorbachev’s action nullified previous government decrees that exiled writers, artists, musicians and activists during the era of Leonid I. Brezhnev.

But Solzhenitsyn’s wife, Natalya, speaking from their home in Cavendish, Vt., said the decree is not enough to enable Solzhenitsyn to return because it does not mention his specific case.

“In Solzhenitsyn’s case, the original decree was not only a deprivation of citizenship, but first of all a forced expulsion from the U.S.S.R. that was accomplished through arrest and the accusation of treason,” she said.

Solzhenitsyn, 71, lives in isolation on his 30-acre estate. Years ago, he told an interviewer: “I have no proof of it, but I have a premonition, a feeling. . . . I think--I am sure--that I will return to Russia and still have a chance to live there.”

Solzhenitsyn’s refusal to return even after Gorbachev’s decree is a bitter blow to the nation’s intelligentsia, which has been longing openly for him to come home to Russia as a final act of healing and redemption to help the nation move on from its Stalinist past and the repression of the Brezhnev years.