MOSCOW : End of an Exile
Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn, Russia’s best known author, is due to end 20 years of exile Friday with a flight across the Pacific to the Far Eastern port city of Vladivostok, where he will start a cross-country journey to Moscow and a new home.
Solzhenitsyn flew from his homeland in handcuffs with a KGB escort in 1974 after his writings angered the Soviet regime. Stripped of his Soviet citizenship, he and his family lived two years in Geneva and the last 18 years in Cavendish, Vt.
His citizenship was restored in 1990 and Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin invited him to return to post-Soviet Russia. But Solzhenitsyn remained in the United States to finish writing “The Red Wheel,” his epic about Russia on the eve of the 1917 Revolution.
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