Alexander Solzhenitsyn has left his exile in the Vermont woods to go home to a Russia remade by a revolution his work did much to kindle. He can count on a hero's welcome, but it is doubtful he will be pleased with what he finds.
In the most important sense for a writer, Mr. Solzhenitsyn returned some five years ago. In 1989, the journal Novy Mir ("New World") finally triumphed over the fossils of the Politburo and serialized Mr. Solzhenitsyn's masterwork, "The Gulag Archipelago."
"Gulag" became a part of the tidal wave of information, loosed not quite intentionally by Mikhail S. Gorbachev, that between 1987 and 1991 eroded the foundations of Communist rule and then swept away the Soviet empire.
What did in the Soviet Union with such shocking rapidity and non-violence was not economic collapse and certainly not American military build-up. Neither was it the intent of Mr. Gorbachev, who was absolutely sincere when he spoke of "renewing socialism" and preserving the union.
In essence, it was the power of words, feared and respected in Russian political tradition, that proved too much for the Soviet colossus. An information revolution that was not merely metaphorical set the world's largest country on a lurching course toward free markets and contested elections -- as well as bandit capitalism and nascent fascism.
Mr. Solzhenitsyn, who once offered the very Russian opinion that a writer can be "a second government," presided over this
revolution from afar, an intellectual founding father.
Repeatedly during the Gorbachev years he rebuffed the entreaties of Russian liberals that he return, insisting that the state formally drop the treason charge against him, restore his citizenship and apologize. All that happened, but still he bided his time, staying in his compound in Cavendish, Vermont, turning away visitors and finishing "The Red Wheel," his mammoth historical novel-cycle of the Bolshevik Revolution.
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At a memorable news conference in November 1988, Vadim Medvedev -- a timorous, white-haired academic whom Mr. Gorbachev had chosen as ideology chief -- was asked whether glasnost might go so far as to rehabilitate Mr. Solzhenitsyn.
Some of Mr. Solzhenitsyn's work, Mr. Medvedev replied, might be published. But much of it -- fictional portrayals of Lenin and especially "The Gulag Archipelago" -- could never be printed, he said. Publication of such blasphemous works, he said in an unwittingly prophetic phrase, "would undermine the very foundations on which our life is built."
Mr. Medvedev and the army of Soviet censors he oversaw were heirs to a long Russian tradition. The greatest poet in the language, Alexander Pushkin, had been accorded the highest possible honor in the 1820s by Czar Nicholas I: not freedom from censorship, but a pledge that the emperor himself would do the editing. "Truth is good," says an old Russian proverb, "but happiness is better."
The Communists had turned this cultural legacy into a sprawling and elaborate system that required the censor's stamp for every news- paper article, every book, every pamphlet -- even for the scripts of stand-up comedians. History was a creative art, written to inspire, not to inform. Stalin's slaughter of millions was discreetly referred to in Soviet history texts as "excesses" or "mistakes."
In this climate, Mr. Solzhenitsyn's publication of "The Gulag Archipelago" abroad in 1973, after the security police seized all known copies of the manuscript, was a spectacular assault on the state's monopoly on information. Its staggering documentation and fierce sarcasm could provoke from the government only two possible replies: imprisonment or exile. KGB agents bundled Mr. Solzhenitsyn aboard an Aeroflot jet to the West in February 1974.
A few years earlier, in 1969, when he was being expelled from the Soviet Writers' Union, Mr. Solzhenitsyn had fired a manifesto back at the toadies of the literary establishment that used an interesting word. "Glasnost," he had written, "honest and complete glasnost -- that is the first condition of health in all societies, including our own."
Mr. Gorbachev, then a provincial party bureaucrat, probably was unaware of the writer's words. But after he came to power in Moscow in 1985, he proposed precisely the same remedy for the Soviet disease.
By the 1980s, Mr. Gorbachev recognized, information control posed a dilemma for the leadership. The Kremlin's power rested on it, but it was increasingly a crippling handicap for the country and economy.
The problem was not, as some Westerners mistakenly believed, that the Soviet economy could not produce. On the contrary, the Soviet Union had kept Nikita S. Khrushchev's vow in the 1960s to surpass the United States by 1980. It produced twice as much steel as the United States, leading the world. It ranked first internationally in production of oil and natural gas; of concrete and lumber; of wheat and potatoes and milk; even of footwear. The list could be extended to an impressive length, and in Soviet economic propaganda, it was.
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But even as the Soviet Union had won the production-statistics race, the United States, Western Europe, Japan and the rising Asian states had shifted to a new kind of economic competition. Electronic technology was transforming economies, linking them into a global market, making a commodity of information and drastically increasing industrial efficiency.
The Soviet Union certainly was capable of mastering sophisticated technology. The bugs planted by the KGB in the tower building of the new U.S. Embassy in Moscow kept the CIA and its consultants busy for years studying the electronics embedded in concrete.
But the Communists eschewed the new technology because they feared it would dangerously erode the state's control of information. Even photocopiers were illegal in private hands, not to mention computers and printers, modems, fax machines and the rest of the arsenal on which Western business was coming to depend.
Mr. Gorbachev understood that the habitual painting-over of reality and the ban on technology were an insurmountable obstacle to economic progress. He began to preach glasnost -- from golos, voice -- for the new openness, the speaking-out, the criticism, the limited freedom of information and information technology he believed could fire up the economy. He envisioned a modernized Soviet colossus, efficient and competitive, but still with 15 republics watched over by the Communist Party.
About glasnost, Mr. Gorbachev often spoke paradoxically, almost in oxymorons, clinging to Soviet habit even as he set sail on the perilous sea of reform. "We are not talking about any kind of limits on glasnost," he told editors in a 1988 speech. "What limits? Glasnost in the interest of the people and of socialism should be without limits. I repeat -- in the interests of the people and of socialism."
But Mr. Gorbachev, as he eased up on the levers of control, did not anticipate the ocean of information that would flood the country. Awaking from a long slumber, the press and television went to work with ferocious energy.
Moscow News, for generations a fatuous propaganda rag, began aggressively to dig up the Stalinist past, to describe life in the West, to scrutinize the brutalities of Soviet life, to expose the privileges of Communist bureaucrats. Crowds gathered every Wednesday outside the weekly's editorial offices on Pushkin Square, elbowing to get a glimpse of the latest edition, pinned up under glass against the building's outside wall.
Television, built by the Communist Party to carry its message into even the humblest Siberian village, phased out its traditional fare -- educational shows with names like "For You, Cattle Breeders" and factory-exceeds-plan movies. In their place appeared path-breaking shows, notably "Vzglyad" ("Glance" or "View"), a Friday-night hybrid of "60 Minutes" and MTV in which hip, young hosts sat around the studio in jeans and sweaters and took pot shots at the sacred: the planned economy, collectivization and industrialization, the Party bureaucracy, Communist doctrine, even the hallowed Lenin.
"Vzglyad" was on the air so late -- till 2 a.m. or later some nights -- that one man wrote to a magazine that he had to watch standing up to keep from falling asleep. But it drew such huge, rapt audiences from Minsk to Vladivostok that in many circles it was considered impolite to propose doing anything else on a Friday night.
Meetings of the Politburo and Central Committee became pitched battles over glasnost, as Mr. Gorbachev's panicky conservative colleagues declared their opposition. This was not merely renewing socialism, as Mr. Gorbachev had promised, they fumed. This was destroying socialism.
But glasnost had taken on such momentum by the fall of 1989 that even Mr. Gorbachev's sudden lashing out at editors and television producers only slightly slowed its pace.
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Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who had urged glasnost on his government so long before, was now the ghost who haunted its enactment as policy. In 1988, when the weekly Knizhnoye Obozreniye ("Book Survey") sneaked past the censors a little article by a literary critic calling for the publication of Mr. Solzhenitsyn's works, it was a sensation. But Mr. Medvedev, the ideologist, replied in the negative.
The editors of Novy Mir kept lobbying. They thought they might be able to start with some of the ideologically milder Solzhenitsyn works. The author raised the stakes: "The Gulag Archipelago" would have to be the first work published, he said.
In its last issue for 1988, listing on the back cover publications planned in the coming year, Novy Mir cheekily named "Gulag." Outraged party officials ordered the presses stopped and the covers ripped off more than a million copies already printed. The battle went on, but "Gulag" had become a touchstone of credibility for glasnost. Political logic carried it inexorably into print in late 1989.
Fifteen years after it was published in the West, his immense chronicle of terror had lost none of its righteous fury. Mr. Solzhenitsyn, who had himself spent 11 years in the Stalinist camps after mentioning "the man with the mustache" in a letter to a friend, wrote about the machinery of terror from the inside, with a savage honesty and on a majestic scale.
Tracing the origins of terror to Lenin's earliest actions after the 1917 revolution, "Gulag" undermined Mr. Gorbachev's argument that Stalin had derailed Lenin's good beginnings. The book's very mass refuted Communist apologists' efforts to minimize or justify Stalin's butchery.
Of course, many sophisticated Russians had picked up bits and pieces of "Gulag" over the years by short-wave radio or in illegal carbon copies typed on onion-skin paper, paged almost beyond legibility in the night kitchens of Leningrad and Moscow. But now rapt readers with the thick, blue, paperbacked Novy Mir could be spotted everywhere, poring over the latest installment of "Gulag": in line for milk in a grubby dairy store on the Garden Ring or rumbling underground across Moscow aboard the Metro.
What Mr. Medvedev could not imagine printing in November 1988 was the central fact of Russian cultural life a year later. And less than a year after that, in September 1990, Komsomolskaya Pravda, still nominally the voice of the Komsomol, or Communist Youth League, and having a circulation over 20 million, printed a special supplement containing (unedited) Mr. Solzhenitsyn's fiercely anti-Communist ruminations on "Rebuilding Russia." Mr. Gorbachev felt compelled to reply, respectfully and on the floor of parliament, to the recluse in Vermont.
Mr. Solzhenitsyn's rehabilitation was complete.
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When Mr. Gorbachev's top appointees decided that things had gone too far and tried to overthrow him in August 1991, there was plenty of reason to believe they would succeed. The junta, after all, included the vice president, the chief of the KGB and the ministers of defense and internal affairs. Yet the coup crumbled almost instantly.
It failed in the face not of armed rebellion but of changed minds. Charged with enforcing the putsch, a substantial number of military men, from the head of the Air Force to the KGB's elite anti-terrorist Group Alpha, simply refused orders. They, too, after all, had been subscribing to Moscow News, watching "Vzglyad" -- and reading "Gulag."
In a BBC interview after his deportation, Mr. Solzhenitsyn had made a prediction: "If today the three volumes of 'The Gulag FTC Archipelago' were widely published in the Soviet Union and were freely available to all, then in a very short space of time no Communist ideology would be left."
It was an immodest thought, but allowing for a little hyperbole, history would bear him out. The coup's failure exposed the impotence of Communist leaders, and democratically elected leaders of the republics moved swiftly to assert the independence of their states. Mr. Gorbachev had been saved by Boris N. Yeltsin and the democratic movement only to oversee the disintegration of the Communist Party and the union.
But the new Russia emerging from the rubble of Soviet rule bears little resemblance to the bulwark of spirituality and tradition that Mr. Solzhenitsyn has often suggested would be Russia's natural destiny if not for the Bolshevik experiment. Moscow today is a chaos of street commercialism, bad American movies, flagrant pornography and prostitution, political extremism and brazen organized crime.
After coming to the United States in 1976, Mr. Solzhenitsyn blasted America's spiritual emptiness in several notoriously ungrateful speeches. "Freedom! To fill people's mailboxes, eyes, ears and brains with commercial rubbish, television programs that are impossible to watch with a sense of coherence," he railed in a speech at the Hoover Institution. "Freedom! To force information on people, taking no account of their right not to accept it or their right to peace of mind. Freedom! To spit in the eyes and souls of passers-by with advertisements! Freedom! For publishers and film producers to poison the younger generations with corrupting filth."
Welcome home, Alexander Isayevich. Revolutions take their own unpredictable course. The land where information for so long was treated as a hazardous substance now, like America, "force [s] it on people." Every newsstand is a cacophony of divergent politics, raucous advertising and, yes, "corrupting filth."
Workmen are rushing to renovate a three-story house -- once the dacha of Lazar Kaganovich, one of Stalin's henchmen -- for Mr. Solzhenitsyn and his family on the Moscow River outside the capital. He will be able to hide away there when he chooses. No one will force him to turn on the TV and watch the Snickers ads or "Police Academy 3" dubbed in Russian -- low end of the information revolution to "Gulag's" high end.
Perhaps not wanting to take in the shock of the capital all at once, Mr. Solzhenitsyn flew to Vladivostok to begin his homecoming with a czar-like journey across all of Russia. After two decades of forced exile, he will undoubtedly take pleasure in the vast landscape, the speech of peasants and of poets.
But after a few months in Moscow, it would be no surprise if he found himself yearning for the purity and simplicity of a Vermont village. There, for many years, the neighbors left him unmolested, and he could conjure up a Russia forged in his own rich and stern imagination.
Scott Shane was Moscow correspondent for The Sun from 1988 to 1991. This article is adapted in part from his book, "Dismantling Utopia: How Information Ended the Soviet Union," which was published this month.