RUSSIAN writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who exposed Stalin's prison system in his novels and spent 20 years in exile, died last night aged 89.
The author of The Gulag Archipelago and One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich, who returned to Russia in 1994, died of either a stroke or heart failure.
The Nobel laureate had suffered from high blood pressure in recent years.
Last night a K
remlin spokesman said: "President Dmitry Medvedev expressed his condolences to Solzhenitsyn's family."
Solzhenitsyn's son, Stepan, told Russian news agencies that his father died of heart failure late last night.
However, other literary sources said the author had suffered a stroke.
The writer died in his home in the Moscow area, where he had lived with his wife Natalya, at 11:45pm local time (7:45pm GMT).
For more than 20 years, the Second World War veteran, who spent eight years in Stalin's labour camps for criticising the Soviet dictator, became a symbol of intellectual resistance to the Communist Party's rule.
The Gulag Archipelago, which was written in secret in the Soviet Union and published in Paris in three volumes between 1973 and 1978, is seen as the definitive work on Stalin's forced labour camps, where tens of millions of Russians perished. It was based upon Solzhenitsyn's own experience, the testimony of former prisoners and Solzhenitsyn's research.
A short-lived policy of de-Stalinisation by the then Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev made possible the publication in 1962 of Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which described the horrifying routine of labour camp life.
Other works, including a series of historical novels and political pamphlets, were banned from publication in the Soviet Union, and their distribution was made a criminal offence.
Major works including The First Circle and Cancer Ward brought Solzhenitsyn world acclaim and the Nobel Prize For Literature in 1970.
Four years later, he was stripped of his citizenship and put on a plane to West Germany for refusing to keep silent about his country's past. He moved to America and became an icon of resistance to communism. He lived in Vermont until his return to Russia in 1994.
Russia's post-Soviet leadership paid respect to Solzhenitsyn, who lived in seclusion outside Moscow after his return.
Solzhenitsyn remained critical of what he saw as the decadence of post-Soviet Russia and had little time for Western-style democracy, which he felt was not a solution for his homeland.
"The main achievement is that Russia has revived its influence in the world," Solzhenitsyn said in a TV interview last year.
"But morally we are too far from what is needed. This cannot be achieved by the state, through parliamentarianism … As far as the state, the public mind and the economy is concerned, Russia is still far away from the country of which I dreamed."
In 2007, he received the Russian State Prize, the highest Russian government award, for his work.
In announcing the prize last year, Yury Osipov, president of the Russian Academy of Sciences, called Solzhenitsyn "the author of works without which the history of the 20th century is unthinkable".
TIMELINE• 1918: Solzhenitsyn born in Kislovodsk, Russia.
• 1945: Convicted of criticising Stalin's leadership during the Second World War. He spent the next decade in prison camps and internal exile.
• 1962: Came to literary prominence with One Day on the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
• 1970: Received the Nobel Prize for Literature for a body of work including The First Circle (1968), and Cancer Ward (1968).
• 1974: Exiled from Russia.
• 1994: Received a hero's welcome on his return from exile.
• 2006: Became the oldest living Nobel laureate in literature.
The full article contains 627 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
