WASHINGTON, August 4, 2008 (AFP) - Alexander Solzhenitsyn may have come to hate the Stalinist Soviet Union, but the capitalist United States did not win his heart either.

Solzhenitsyn, who died on Sunday aged 89, spent 18 years living in a remote villae in the Vermont forests of the northern United States. He returned home in May 1994 after an exile marked by mutual misunderstanding.

Uneasy relations quickly emerged between the Americans, proud of a democracy they consider to be an example to the whole world, and the author of 'The Gulag Archipeligo'.

The conflict blew up on June 8, 1978, two years after Solzhenitsyn left Switzerland to set up in Cavendish, a village of 1,300 people, which Solzhenitsyn described as a little piece of Russia.

On that day, addressing Harvard University students, the survivor of the Stalinist gulags said he would not recommend the United States as a model for transforming the Soviet Union.

While in the East the party manages everything, he said, in the West everything is managed by commerce.

He denounced the West for a lack of civil courage, defended the war in Vietnam and blasted the press.

Solzhenitsyn embarrassed everyone, and especially the White House, to which he was never invited.

At a time when the priority of US foreign policy was to come to arms controls deals with the Soviet Union, Solzhenitsyn warned against the dangers of 'detente' with a regime which he considered criminal.

In 1975, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger recommended that President Gerald Ford not meet the writer so as not to offend the Soviet authorities.

The official attitude changed with Ronald Reagen, who had denounced the Soviet Union as a 'evil empire' and who invited Solzhenitsyn to lunch. He declined the invitation in May 1982.

Solzhenitsyn explained in an interview with CBS television that while he would be prepared for an in-depth conversation with Reagan, he could not find time for 'symbolic gestures'.

His wife Natalia Solzhenitsyn when questioned by the New Yorker magazine about an eventual public speech by her husband before his return to Russia in May 1994, asked who in America would invite him to talk and who in America wanted to listen to him.

In an interview in the New Yorker published in February 1994 Solzhenitsyn declared that from a professional point of view, his 18 years in Vermont were the happiest of his life, and the richest period of his creative work.

But he lived less in America, than in a place ressembling Russia he had found in Vermont.

Although he read English, he hardly spoke it and spent his time delved in the Russian language.

He acknowledged that he had not made great efforts to go to the forefront in America, but said that in order to make efforts to please the West he would have had to abandon his style of life and work.

Solzhenitsyn had mulled at a certain time becoming an American citizen. In 1985 he had even submitted an official naturalisation request.

But when the time came only his wife Natalia swore the oath and became American. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, that day, did not feel well.