Moscow Drops Treason Case Against Solzhenitsyn

The Soviet Union’s chief prosecutor Tuesday dropped treason charges against the Russian novelist Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn, clearing the way for the Nobel Prize-winner to return home after 17 years of exile.

Nikolai Trubin, the Soviet prosecutor general, said there is no evidence to substantiate charges that Russia’s greatest living author had “betrayed the motherland” through his sharply critical writings on the Soviet era.

Solzhenitsyn, not only absolved of the treason charges but also vindicated by the country’s abandonment of communism, declared from America that he would return to his beloved Russia and join the efforts to pull the nation out of the profound moral crisis that he believes is at the root of the country’s problems.

“The decision of the Soviet prosecutor general now removes legal obstacles impeding my return to my homeland,” Solzhenitsyn, 72, said in a statement broadcast from his farm in Cavendish, Vt., over the Voice of America and Radio Rossiya. “Therefore it becomes a reality, and I will return to my native land.

“But first I should complete here my literary works which I began earlier. Upon returning to Russia, other problems will encircle me, and I will share them with everybody.”

Solzhenitsyn’s exoneration was the result of the liberal triumph after the conservative coup d’etat a month ago and yet another step by the nation to recognize its true heroes and rectify the mistakes made in more than seven decades of Communist rule.

After reviewing the 1974 case against Solzhenitsyn, Trubin said in a statement that he had found “no proof whatsoever testifying to any crime committed by Alexander Solzhenitsyn.”

“The case is closed because of the absence of any actions by Alexander Solzhenitsyn with criminal intent,” Trubin said. The decision to expel Solzhenitsyn and strip him of his Soviet citizenship is invalid, he added.

Solzhenitsyn was arrested on the treason charges on a bleak winter day in 1974 after the publication in Paris of the first volume of the “Gulag Archipelago,” his trilogy exposing the Soviet system of prison camps.

Interrogated overnight at the KGB’s grim Lubyanka headquarters, he was stripped of his citizenship and summarily deported to West Germany the following evening on the orders of the late President Leonid I. Brezhnev.

“Kill me quickly because I write the truth about Russian history!” he had warned the regime. “Live not by lies!” he had told his fellow countrymen.

Solzhenitsyn, who had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970, had, in fact, gone far beyond criticism of the police state through which Josef Stalin had ruled for nearly 30 years.

The Soviet Union itself, Solzhenitsyn argued with literary brilliance and a wealth of historical material, was a giant prison system, an immoral state established in blood and maintained through repression.

Solzhenitsyn began as a critic, with scattered lines questioning Stalin’s leadership, in letters to a friend that he wrote from the front in World War II. Arrested in 1945 as a subversive, he spent seven years in a labor camp and then three more in internal exile before he was released in 1956.

His first published expose, “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” told how millions of people spent decades of their lives in the Siberian prison camps. The book was published in 1962 only with the approval of Nikita S. Khrushchev, who had launched a campaign of de-Stalinization. After Khrushchev’s fall two years later, the political climate changed.

Solzhenitsyn was harassed by the KGB and his works were not published. Finally, after he smuggled his manuscripts abroad, he was arrested, charged with treason after a huge propaganda campaign against him and deported.

The expulsion outraged the world, and the cynical calculation that Solzhenitsyn would wither in exile and soon be forgotten proved wrong.

His books, once banned, are now widely available, published in huge editions and quickly sold out in Soviet bookstores. His essays are reprinted widely in the Soviet press. And leading political commentators, writers and philosophers debate his ideas on radio and television talk shows.

A modern-day prophet accustomed to rebuking world leaders, Solzhenitsyn continued to condemn the Soviet system, criticizing the early reforms of President Mikhail S. Gorbachev as grossly insufficient.

Russia had yet to return to its spiritual heritage, he wrote in a 16,000-word essay last year, and it would not recover until it rid itself of communism. The essay is now a major element in the thinking of the Russian leadership.

Refusing to accept back his Soviet citizenship last year unless all his books were published here and the treason charges dropped, Solzhenitsyn set his own terms for return to a country that had exiled him.

“What I predicted a quarter-century ago has now happened,” Solzhenitsyn commented in an interview broadcast last week on NBC Television. “In the West at that time, they either did not believe it or did not think it was necessary, what I called for and predicted.”

He apparently sensed what was coming in his native land.

“We will definitely return back home to Russia,” he told reporters during a town festival in Cavendish over the weekend. “I said a long time ago that I definitely will return, and that stays intact. I am not going to live here forever.”

But Solzhenitsyn also said that he was still in the midst of his epic work on the Russian Revolution and the beginning of the Soviet era, and that he could not quickly leave his secluded 50-acre estate in Cavendish and the privacy it gives him to write.