Solzhenitsyn Trip Offers Grim Picture of Russia : Reforms: Citizens are suffering, writer says after cross-country trek to gauge nation’s problems.

After a 20-year exile in the West and an eight-week rail trek across Russia, Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn returned to Moscow on Thursday night with a litany of complaints from his compatriots and a grim verdict that this country and its reforms are “in big, heavy and multifaceted trouble.”

“Nobody expected that the way out of communism would be painless, but nobody expected it would be so painful,” Russia’s greatest living writer declared. “We have tried to break away from communism, but again and again we have taken the clumsiest, hardest and most twisted path.

“Everywhere, you can hear moans that the state is, again, not fulfilling its obligations before its citizens,” he added.

His harsh judgment, delivered to about 1,000 people in the rain outside Moscow’s Yaroslavl train station, put the 75-year-old sage squarely in the struggle to change Russia’s direction. It marked a new challenge for Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin, who in recent months has gained a measure of political and economic stability.

Having spoken with thousands of people on a 5,900-mile journey of rediscovery from Russia’s Far East, through Siberia, the Ural Mountains and the Volga River valley, Solzhenitsyn brought added authority to complaints he had uttered from exile that the Yeltsin government’s free-market reforms are helping to impoverish this country and corrupt its values.

“I wrote down everything they said . . . their advice, requests, pleading, insisting . . . and I will bring all this to the ears of those who have power and influence,” Solzhenitsyn said upon arrival.

Then he ticked off their woes: Farmers are being ripped off by middlemen, he said. Huge failing factories are dragging down the welfare of entire cities. Doctors and teachers are working “almost without reward.” The 25 million ethnic Russians who live in neighboring countries are being ignored. “A snake of crime is threatening to strangle all of us,” he said.

But his most damning appraisal, which drew the loudest applause, mocked Yeltsin’s claim to be Russia’s first democratic leader. “People in our country are not masters of their fate,” he said. “We cannot say that democracy is in power. There is no democracy here.”

Russians will be hearing all this again when Solzhenitsyn addresses Parliament after its summer recess. Moving quickly to get Yeltsin out of the firing line, his spokesman suggested Thursday that the author meet soon with the president.

Other politicians of varying stripes lined up to welcome the writer and court him as an ally. Sergei Barburin, a right-wing nationalist, predicted that Solzhenitsyn will side with the “patriotic opposition.” Moscow Mayor Yuri M. Luzhkov, who has presidential ambitions, introduced Solzhenitsyn at the rail station as “the man who best knows Russia from within.”

Asked from the crowd whether he will run for president, Solzhenitsyn repeated his vow to shun public office. “But I will use all the possibilities to speak and exert influence,” he added. “That is my role.”

Some politicians have suggested that the conservative anti-Communist writer, who has refrained from criticizing Yeltsin by name, will bolster the anti-Yeltsin ranks while moderating their extremism. Apparently sensing his isolation, neo-fascist politician Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky, whom Solzhenitsyn has labeled a “crude caricature of (a) patriot,” said Thursday that the writer should “go back where he came from.”

Solzhenitsyn has lived 18 of the last 20 years in Vermont. Having spent eight years in Josef Stalin’s prison camps and exposed their cruelties in his powerful writings, he was arrested by Soviet authorities in 1974 and stripped of his citizenship.

His east-to-west trek across Russia began May 27 in the Pacific port city of Vladivostok, where he hitched his private luxury rail car to the Trans-Siberian Express. He unhitched it in cities along the way, staying for days at a time and packing auditoriums and public squares with admirers, many of whom welcomed him as a prophet.

“Seeing Solzhenitsyn is as cleansing as going to a beautiful temple,” said Yuri Bakhtin, 35, a businessman who came to hear the writer speak. “He is a living legend. . . . Let’s see if he will change us and our ways or if we will change him.”

Solzhenitsyn’s conversion from literary hermit in Vermont to touring celebrity in Russia can only enhance his influence. Having finished his biggest work, a four-volume history of Russia on the eve of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, he has returned to a nation that, to his surprise, is more eager to hear his words than to read them. In one poll last month, 44% of those questioned had not read one of his books.

Still, the author said he had “met lots of healthy souls, curious, active, searching minds, often in confusion, not knowing how to direct themselves.” In his lone note of optimism, he said Russians “will manage to get out of this pit” but only with “high responsibility at the top and great effort from beneath.”

Sergei L. Loiko of The Times’ Moscow Bureau contributed to this report.