Solzhenitsyn Returns From 20-Year Exile

Solemn and prophetic, Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn ended his 20-year exile Friday with an appeal to people across Russia to seize the initiative in directing their troubled country’s post-Communist rebirth.

“I know that I am coming to a Russia torn apart, discouraged, stunned, altered beyond recognition, convulsively searching for itself, for its true identity,” the country’s greatest living author told an evening homecoming rally in this Pacific port city, his starting point for a Trans-Siberian rail journey to rediscover his country and compatriots.

“I would like, after these meetings, to help you and search together with you for sure ways to get out of our 75-year quagmire,” added Solzhenitsyn, who exposed his Soviet tormentors with powerful writings that earned him the Nobel Prize in 1970--and expulsion from his homeland Feb. 14, 1974.

About 2,000 people waited three hours on a gray, blustery evening in a seaside plaza for his dramatic return on an Air Alaska commercial flight from the United States. They applauded when his brief speech ended with the words, “I bow to you.”

“We bow to you!” someone shouted.

Then, answering a question from the audience, the author said that Russia’s revival after seven decades of Soviet rule and two years of tumultuous, divisive and stalled democratic reforms would be “difficult, not soon,” and would ultimately depend on Russians taking responsibility for their own fate.

“We have been through other difficult times,” he said, recalling the Time of Troubles in the 17th Century, when resistance from the hinterlands freed Moscow from Polish rule. “What great initiative we had then!

“In reality, our fate is in our hands, starting with every step of life . . . the little choices taken at the grass-roots level,” he said, warming to the populist theme of his journey. “The turn life takes depends on us, not from the decisions bestowed on us from somewhere on high, somewhere in Moscow.”

“That’s true!” called another voice from the crowd.

Judging from his remarks and his ambitious travel plans, the bearded, craggy-faced author intends, at age 75, to play a guiding role in Russian life--even though he has forsworn seeking elective or appointed office. His voice could provide a rallying cry for regional and local leaders seeking to wrest more autonomy from the central government of President Boris N. Yeltsin.

In an interview with Russia’s Itar-Tass news agency, Solzhenitsyn was more categorical about his mission and blunter in his criticism of Moscow, which he said “is leading a privileged life compared with the provinces.”

He said he was returning home east to west because “to begin with Moscow means to lock oneself in a concrete box.”

“My literary task is fulfilled,” he added. “Now I will have no time to write. It’s time to get down to the hard work of rebuilding and reviving Russia.”

Many who turned out to see Solzhenitsyn, such as Galina N. Petrovna, said they are ready to follow his prescriptions as those of a sage.

Petrovna, a graying, bright-eyed woman of 69, came to the square bedecked with Soviet medals earned for underground resistance in a Nazi prison camp. But she was a reluctant hero, having lost her father in the Stalin regime’s political executions.

“I have been waiting for this moment all my life,” she said at the rally for Solzhenitsyn. “Here is a great man who can show us how to rebuild our country. If we had worked like he does, by the call of our souls and hearts, we would live now in a different, much happier country.”

Anticipating the writer’s long journey home in a front-page headline, the Moscow newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta declared, “Solzhenitsyn, like the sun, rises in the east.”

The trip began Wednesday in an Oldsmobile station wagon, lumbering down the unpaved driveway from the hilltop country home in Cavendish, Vt., where Solzhenitsyn spent the last 18 years writing in near-seclusion.

With a newly issued Russian passport, the author flew to Anchorage, Alaska, with his wife, Natalia, and Stephan, 20, the youngest of their three sons. They left behind the middle son, Ignat, 21, and Natalia’s mother, Yekaterina Svetlova, who will join them later. The eldest son, Yermolai, 23, flew here, 5,700 miles from Moscow, ahead of his parents to help arrange the overland journey to the capital, which he called “the greatest road trip you could do.”

Air Alaska’s first touchdown in Russia came at Magadan, once a main receiving point for those destined for the Soviet gulag prison camp system. Solzhenitsyn, who spent eight years in the gulag and exposed its evils in his best-known works, once described Magadan as the site containing the most human bones on Earth.

Stepping off the jet, Solzhenitsyn stooped, touched the tarmac with both hands and crossed himself.

“Today, in the heat of political change, those millions of victims are too lightly forgotten, both by those who were not touched by that annihilation and even more so by those who were responsible for it,” he said.

“Under ancient Christian tradition, land where innocent victims are buried becomes holy. We shall consider it so, in the hope that the light of Russia’s coming recovery will reach (this) region.”

Landing in Vladivostok, he accepted an offering of bread and salt--a Russian symbol of hospitality--and raised the loaf to his lips.

He also kissed Igor P. Lebedinets, the acting territorial governor, who postponed an official visit to South Korea to organize a welcome. The city’s Russian Orthodox bishop was on hand to give his blessing.

“All the best people are leaving Russia, and Solzhenitsyn is the one coming back,” said Antonina N. Detyareva, 39, who was selling dried squid and imported apples just off the puddled airport parking lot. “Maybe that will set a good example.”

The writer returned a controversial figure, however, scorned by many who miss the old order and condemn him for helping destroy it.

“He’ll get no warm welcome from me,” said Vladimir A. Gornoslal, 45, a taxi driver at the airport. “I don’t like traitors.”

Arriving in the seaside square, the writer found it still dominated by a Stalinesque statue, four stories high, of a proletarian soldier-hero. “To those who struggled for Soviet power in the years 1917-1922,” the caption reads.

But this raucous city of 700,000, closed to outsiders until 1992, is a leading arena of post-Soviet transformations, good and bad. Hundreds of joint ventures with Japanese, South Korean, Chinese and U.S. firms are under way. But crime and corruption are flourishing, and the gap between newly rich and newly impoverished is growing. City services are crumbling.

Solzhenitsyn turned down offers by the local authorities to stay in more luxurious quarters and chose the Vladivostok, a $90-per-night hotel that, along with most of the city these days, has no hot water.

Sergei Loiko, a reporter in the Times Moscow Bureau, contributed to this report.