Emotional homecoming towards end of Soviet era

RUSSIA: When exiled artists and writers began to return to Moscow in the final days of the Soviet Union, under Mikhail Gorbachev…

RUSSIA:When exiled artists and writers began to return to Moscow in the final days of the Soviet Union, under Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of glasnost, one of the most emotional homecomings was that for Mstislav Rostropovich. Banished from Russia in 1978, the cellist and conductor was allowed back in February 1990, writes Conor O'Clery

The pro-reform culture minister, Nikolai Gubenko, introduced the slight, balding musician to the press at the foreign ministry in Moscow. The Russian journalists greeted him with rapturous applause.

"When I left the Soviet Union, it was a big island of lies," said Rostropovich. "But now the Soviet Union is cleaning itself of lies." His wife, the Bolshoi opera singer Galina Vishnevskaya, her eyes flashing with anger, recalled the "barbarous act" of Leonid Brezhnev in revoking their passports.

The couple's official disgrace had resulted from their defence of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who had enraged the Kremlin with his defiant writing about Soviet prison camps.

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Rostropovich and his wife had allowed the author of the Gulag Archipelago to stay at their dacha at Zhukovka outside Moscow, protecting him with their famous names, before he was exiled in 1974.

Those of us who went to Rostropovich's first concert after his return, in the Moscow Conservatory, experienced some of the old bullying tactics to which his fans had been subject in earlier times. We had to pass a checkpoint where militiamen held people back for no reason.

Tempers became frayed and the militiamen lost control. I recall a Swedish diplomat falling on the frozen snow and an old woman crying in pain as a barrier struck her back.

The encounter left everyone trembling with fury. Inside the 125-year-old conservatory, which had in its day nourished Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov and Khachaturian, every seat and aisle was crammed with people. When Rostropovich arrived on stage the auditorium erupted.

Leading the applause was Galina in a box beside the stage, jewellery glittering defiantly on her black costume. Beside her Raisa Gorbachev clapped enthusiastically.

The last time Rostropovich had played here, in 1971, the high-ceilinged hall had tingled with electricity as a slight, bearded figure appeared. "It's Solzhenitsyn, there's Solzhenitsyn," they whispered.

The electricity crackled again through the hall that evening in February 1990, as we listened to the maestro conduct the haunting music of Dvorak's cello concerto, delivered as a hymn of triumph for those who had longed for the day Rostropovich would return.