When Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974, it was front-page news throughout the Western press. Photographs of the welcoming Heinrich Böll greeting a confused and blinking Solzhenitsyn stick in the memory.

What about the Soviet press? Was there any mention of this momentous event, or was it passed over in complete silence? My curiosity took me to Collet's Russian bookshop, then in Coptic Street, near the British Museum. There I found copies of the relevant issues of Pravda (February 14 1974) and Izvestiya (February 15 1974). Tucked away on the back page was an identical announcement from TASS, stating "By decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, A. I. Solzhenitsyn has been deprived of his Soviet citizenship for actions against the state and expelled from the Soviet Untion" (no photograph).

Some years later, I was looking for a Russian text of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and went again to Collet's, now in rather grander premises in the Charing Cross Road. It had been published in Moscow in the journal, Novy mir, in the early 1960s, and I was aware that I might have trouble finding a reprint. What I was completely unprepared for was the reaction of the shop assistant to my inquiry: "We don't sell Solzhenitsyn" – not "I'm sorry, it hasn't been reprinted for a while", or even "Try down the road at Foyles", but the dogmatic reaction worthy of the staunchest apparatchik – and this from a normal-looking young Englishwoman on Charing Cross Road in London.

Collet's is no more. Like the statue of Dzerzhinsky from the square outside the Lubyanka, it has disappeared, and Solzhenitsyn is back on Russian soil.

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