After 2 Decades, Solzhenitsyn to Return to Russia, Wife Says

Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn, Russia’s most revered living writer, will return home next year after two decades of exile in the United States but will not become involved in Russian politics, his wife said in a television interview broadcast Saturday.

“We are already on our way to Russia,” said Natalya Solzhenitsyn, adding that the homecoming, tentatively set for May, 1994, would depend on the completion of a home the couple is building on the outskirts of Moscow.

However, she said, “he asked me to tell you all that he is not going to run for president or even for Parliament. His hand will never touch any lever of power.”

Literature has taken a back seat to economics here since the demise of the Soviet Union, whose abuses Solzhenitsyn dedicated his life to exposing. Still, the return of the 74-year-old Nobel laureate is expected to create a sensation.

One year ago, Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin, on a trip to America, telephoned Solzhenitsyn at the writer’s home in Vermont to convey his sorrow at past Kremlin persecution. Yeltsin personally invited the writer, who was escorted to the border in handcuffs by the KGB in 1974, to return.

The Moscow News reported last month that Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov had given the writer an unfinished house in a lush area of Moscow where Soviet Politburo members once had dachas. The newspaper reported that the house is valued at more than $7,000--a seemingly princely sum in a nation where the average monthly salary is now equal to about $23.

Russians are also speculating about whether the author will turn his hand to politics.

Though Solzhenitsyn is an ardent nationalist, he has supported Yeltsin in his battle with the conservative Parliament, favors a strong presidential system and has praised Yeltsin’s commitment to private ownership of land.

“The Russian Federation, with its size and diversity, cannot exist without strong presidential power, just as strong as in the United States,” Solzhenitsyn wrote in March to Russia’s ambassador to the United States.

Solzhenitsyn fought for the Soviet Union in World War II but then exposed the brutality of the Stalinist system in a series of books about Soviet labor camps and cancer wards. He was awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize for literature.