Reform? What reform? cries Solzhenitsyn: This is a false democracy, Russians told

A WONKY lift in Vladivostok City Hospital was about the only place Alexander Solzhenitsyn could get any peace. It broke between the first floor and the basement. It took 20 minutes to extract the greatest Russian writer of the century.

'While in the stuck elevator he managed to have a very productive conversation with the head of the hospital,' said his son, Stepan, a third-year student at Harvard University. 'The first couple of days in Vladivostok have been a mob scene. Hopefully, things will settle down soon.'

For all the momentous changes since the KGB bundled Solzhenitsyn on an Aeroflot flight for Frankfurt in February 1974, the 75-year-old Nobel prizewinner is back in Russia in much the same manner he left it: besieged by arc lights and journalists.

The most important difference in Vladivostok is that Russian newspapers, which in 1974 confined themselves to an official Tass report condemning the writer as anti-Soviet, have joined the fray. As have Russian politicians, nearly all of whom, whatever their persuasion, are eager to court his favour. Boris Yeltsin sent him a welcoming telegram: 'You are returning home in difficult, controversial times. I am convinced your talent, your experience as a historian and a thinker will help us all in rebuilding Russia.'

Mr Yeltsin may be disappointed, as were many in the West who embraced Solzhenitsyn as a prophet of anti-communism only to discover he disapproved of their system too. What gives Solzhenitsyn so much moral authority - and attracts so many cameras - is that he has always done things in his own way, no matter what the strength of forces telling him to do otherwise.

The trait is as sharp now as it was when he drove Leonid Brezhnev's politburo to a frenzy by daring to publish The Gulag Archipelago abroad, or shocked Americans by mocking freedom as the right to 'spit in the eyes and souls of passers-by with advertisements'.

Having returned to Russia on Friday after a 38-hour journey from Vermont, yesterday he drove one final stake through the Communist Party by commandeering its former headquarters in Vladivostok for a press conference - only the third he has ever given.

The region's deputy governor, Igor Lebedinets, a seasoned party bureaucrat, cringed as Solzhenitsyn explained how the nomenklatura must pay for what they did to Russia: 'They did the wrecking. They threw us into the abyss.'

Rather than endorse Mr Yeltsin's reforms, he said of their chief architect, the former prime minister, Yegor Gaidar: 'Gaidar flung his brainless reforms at us. I refuse to accept that reforms are now under way. Reform is a construction of thought-out and interrelated measures. There has been no such reform in Russia.'

Privatisation, often held up as the most important change since the end of communism, was dismissed as a 'massive deceit' with national wealth being sold off 'for peanuts'.

'Democracy is rule of the people,' he said. 'But the people are cut off from power. People do not control their own fate. People control nothing. Where is our democracy? I've said it many times. This is a false democracy.'

He started his first full day back in Russia with a visit to a market. In the shadow of statues of Bolsheviks who fought the White Russian army in the far east during Russia's civil war, he shared the national pastime of complaining about the price of sausages. 'When I left prices were quite different. I'm not used to it.'

The stall owners told him to come back tomorrow and they would be different again.

Mr Yeltsin's enemies based their election campaigns last December on much the same themes. But they too will find little comfort from Solzhenitsyn, who described the right- wing nationalist, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, as a 'caricature of a patriot' and complained that former Communist bosses had been let off too easily. But the 1917 revolution remains the original sin: 'The roots of our ills today lie in the crimes of our fathers and grandfathers.'

Solzhenitsyn denies any interest in political power for himself. He says he will 'occupy no political post, either by appointment or by election'. But he is keen to make his influence felt. 'I will of course speak out,' he said. There has never been a better time, he believes, to make himself heard.

He dismissed carping in the Moscow media that he should have come immediately after the abortive 1991 putsch, and not waited so long. 'Not only do I think I am not late, I feel I've come at exactly the right time.'

But for him to do anything, he complained, journalists must leave him alone: 'I've just come from Vermont. Give me some time,' he pleaded. 'Why do you have to do everything today?'

(Photograph omitted)