Solzhenitzyn's good reasons for reluctance to go home - author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's hesitation to return to Russia - Column

0 Comments | Insight on the News, March 8, 1993 | by Arnold Beichman

Russia awaits the return of a great hero of the Cold War, but he does not come. Alexander Isayevich Solzhenitsyn sits in his home in Vermont writing but resists invitations to go home.

Strange. His wife, Natalia, his sons Ermolai and Stepan, both at Harvard, and her son by a previous marriage, Dmitri, a New York documentary film producer, visited Russia from May to July last year. Several Russian periodicals interviewed Mrs. Solzhenitsyn seeking an explanation for band's behavior. One Russian magazine even apologized to Mrs. Solzhenitsyn for the awful things they had written about her husband in the good old Bolshevik days.

President Boris Yeltsin of Russia received Mrs. Solzhenitsyn for a chat and, according to the newspaper Izvestia, Yeltsin assured her that "the doors are open" for Solzhenitsyn's return to Russia. The first thing Yeltsin did when he came to the U.S. in June was to telephone Solzhenitsyn in Vermont to invite him back. Yet the author of The Gulag Archipelago doesn't move.

The decision has been made to move. Before the year ends, Solzhenitsyn will leave his home in Cavendish, Vt., where he has lived for more than a decade, and return to his native land.

He had said during Mikhail Gorbachev's presidency that he would return to Russia only when his books, especially The Gulag Archipelago, were published in full. The gulag novel was so published and was on Russian best-seller lists for some 18 months. Solzhenitsyn could have gone back anytime in the past five years. Why, then, so long a delay. John Dunlop, a noted Sovietologist and a student of Solzhenitsyn's career, wrote that the novelist would not return to Russia until he felt sure that Russia would not revert to its dismal past. His article in the January issue of the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Research Report was written well before Solzhenitsyn made his decision.

A major reason for Solzhenitsyn's reluctance to move was his belief that communism still blemished the Russian landscape and that the KGB was still a threat to Russian democratic hopes. Whether he thinks matters have improved is not known. However, he told a Russian television interviewer in September: "Communism has by no means completely collapsed. The upper link has fallen apart, but the middle link - a very tenacious one - remains. A great many members of the former nomenklatura - a great many - have declared themselves to be democrats." These so-called former communists are part of a new Russian elite who, he said, are "the sharks of the financial underworld, people whom it is shameful even to call entrepreneurs."

He added: "The more adroit members of the nomenklatura, especially those who must launder the [Communist] party's money, have become intertwined with [the sharks]. . . . If this ruling class should come together, it will oppress us not for 70 but for 170 years."

As for the KGB, he said in the interview, it "has remained, only its facade has been decorated somewhat. The KGB remains a large force with a large apparatus and long, far-reaching tentacles."

There are good personal reasons for Solzhenitsyn's concern about the KGB. A Russian journal last year provided a long account of how the KGB attempted to assassinate him by poison in the city of Novocherkassk on Aug. 8, 1971. The same Russian paper, Sovershenno Sekretno, reported that on July 3, 1990, the KGB burned 105 volumes of its files on Solzhenitsyn (his KGB code name was "spider") in the furnaces of the infamous Moscow Lubyanka, once the KGB headquarters.

There is also a legitimate technical reason for Solzhenitsyn to postpone his journey back to Russia, according to his wife. He is presently "engaged in completing works . . . that are connected with Western interlibrary exchanges. Russia is not a member of that [library] association, and he will not be able to get the materials he needs [in Russia.]" When he returns to Russia, she said, Solzhenitsyn will be writing shorter works for which library materials would not be needed.

One thing to be noted about the Solzhenitsyn family: They are not returning to Russia with a fortune. Despite his enormous book sales throughout the world, Solzhenitsyn donated all his royalties from Gulag to a fund for Soviet political prisoners and their families. How much money that amounts to is not publicly known, but it could be in the millions.

Arnold Beichman, a Hoover Institution research fellow, is a Washington Times columnist. He is the author of the just-published Anti-Americanism: Its Causes and Consequences.