ABSTRACT
Humiliation, the terror of his childhood in an outpost of the Russian empire, would be exorcized for the entire Russian nation. In April 1991, with Boris Yeltsin having pushed through the Russian Congress the principle of presidential elections, Mikhail Gorbachev and the Soviet leadership drew up a strategy to stop him. The bulk of Russia’s Choice deputies had been elected as local members, propelled into office by their reputation or local position as a Yeltsin-appointed administrator. The deputies of Russia’s Choice tried to block his election by abstaining to prevent him obtaining half the votes of all sitting members, as required by the rules. Yeltsin was transforming himself into an uncompromising neo-nationalist. There would be no quarter offered to criminals or separatists in the pursuit of a strong Russian state. On 27 May 1994, exactly five years after the first parliament in modern Russia opened, Alexander Solzhenitzyn returned to his homeland after twenty years in exile.
