Rebuilding Russia (New ed)

Breaking the silence that marked his 16-year exile, the voice of Alexander Solzhenitsyn has again been heard in the Soviet Union.

Initially at the urging of the editors of "Komsomolskaya Pravda", the newspaper of the Communist Youth League, he has written a bitter indictment of recent Soviet history, including the much-heralded reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev.

At the centre of his attack is an urgent call for the disbanding of the monolithic Soviet Union and the resurrection of a nation comprising the three Slavic republics of Russia, the Ukraine, and Byelorussia, and parts of Kazakhstan.

Deeply troubled by what he sees as the sapping of Slavic cultural and spiritual vigour under the stultifying influence of colonial empire, he nevertheless derides the violence that has accompanied the struggle for ethnic independence.

Solzhenitsyn is outspoken as he condemns the moral and economic impoverishment of the Soviet Union, dismisses the "troubadours" of reform and scorns the KGB's protestations of greater leniency.