One day in the stormy life of Solzhenitsyn: Andrew Higgins, in Vladivostok, saw a Russian prophet return to his own country

TO ONE SIDE swaggered a Bolshevik bugler, bloated in bronze to mammoth dimensions atop a granite pedestal; on the other, dwarfed but triumphant, stood a tired 75-year-old with a scraggy beard, a baggy coat and the modest hope, amplified by loudspeakers to reach the crowd, that 'our country's long-suffering people might finally find a ray of light ahead'.

Nearly half a century after Soviet authorities sent him to the Gulag and two decades after they banished him to the West, Alexander Solzhenitsyn yesterday came home.

An odyssey, that began in 1945 with imprisonment for jokes about Stalin's moustache, ended with applause and a Far East sunset in Vladivostok's seafront square. 'I never doubted that Communism would inevitably collapse,' he told a crowd of some 3,000, 'but I was always fearful that our exit from it would be terribly painful. I know that I am returning to a Russia tortured, stunned, altered beyond recognition, convulsively searching for itself, for its own true identity.'

A Nobel laureate for literature and figure of immovable conviction, Solzhenitsyn has been both hailed and mocked as a moral saviour - a modern-day Tolstoy or a Slavic Khomeini - in a country deeply unsure of its bearings.

Politicians of all stripes are lobbying for his endorsement. In a hint of the cacophony that will grow louder as he approaches the centre of power in Moscow, a few protesters waved banners in support of the Vladivostok mayor, Viktor Cherpekov, recently evicted from his office by riot police and then arrested on what are widely seen as trumped-up charges of bribery. Another group held a poster attacking Western democracy as a sham.

Solzhenitsyn, however, dwelt more on the importance of the past than prescriptions for the present - the same theme that has inspired almost his entire literary oeuvre, from One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The Gulag Archipelago to The Red Wheel, a massive four-part work which occupied most of his 18 years in the United States.

On the last stage of a 38-hour journey from Vermont to Vladivostok, Mr Solzhenitsyn used a refuelling stop in Magadan, one-time capital of Stalin's camp system, to pay homage to past victims: 'In the heat of political change, those millions of victims are too lightly forgotten by those who were not touched by that annihilation and even by those who were responsible for it.

'I bow to the land of Kolymar, where many hundreds of thousands of our fellow countrymen, if not millions, are buried. Under ancient Christian tradition, land where innocent victims are buried becomes holy.'

As he stepped from the plane in Vladivostok, two peroxide blondes in embroidered dresses hastily conducted a traditional welcome, with offerings of bread and salt. Solzhenitsyn then staggered through the scrum to pass formally into Russia - and get stamped the only passport he has held since being stripped of Soviet citizenship and papers in 1974.

''Now the prophet is home,' announced the Vladivostok newspaper Novosti. Seven time zones away in Moscow the view is more cynical: 'Is Solzhenitsyn a genius as a writer? History will answer this question,' wrote Vitaly Tretyakov, editor of Nezavisimaya Gazeta. 'However, he is certainly a genius at creating a place in history for himself. To invent such an idea - to arrive in Russia on a white horse not through Moscow but, to everybody's suprise, right from the opposite side, via Vladivostok. There is hardly a living script writer in the world who could invent such a scenario.'

Such comments will pain Mr Solzhenitsyn little. He has little time for the capital: 'Moscow has always lived differently from the rest of Russia,' he said yesterday, 'Moscow views Russia in the same way as Europe views Moscow.'

Solzhenitsyn's secret, page 8