Moscow - Hundreds of mourners stood hunched in the endless
rain on Tuesday to pay tribute to Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the former
dissident Russian Nobel author, lying in state at the Academy of
Sciences in Moscow
An honour guard stood at the four corners of his coffin, heaped in
long-stemmed flowers deposited in twos by Muscovites who filed passed
the open bier, crossing themselves.
A wall-sized, black-and-white portrait of Solzhenitsyn was flanked
by a Russian flag at the end of the academy's vast hall that
reverberated with all the trappings of a state funeral.
The former exile but deep patriot had prayed to die at home, his
widow Natalya said. He died of heart failure at the age of 89 on late
Sunday.
She and Solzhenitsyn's son held vigil occasionally walking over to
lay a hand on the edge of the coffin or bend down to kiss it, Russian
television images showed.
Solzhenitsyn, who unflinchingly chronicled the horrors of the
Soviet Gulag camps, remains a controversial figure - almost
irrelevant to the next generation sucked-forward in Russia's head-
long resurgence.
Some mourners held copies of his first revolutionary expose on
life in the camps where he spent eight years, One Day in The Life of
Ivan Denisovich, miraculous allowed to be published in 1962 by then-
Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.
'I was 10-years-old but I remember it as a shock. It was a
revolution, it was all anybody could talk about for weeks,' said
Masha Lipman, an analyst at the Moscow Carnegie Centre.
But by the 1970s, Russians could once again be jailed for owning a
copy of Solzhenitsyn's four-volume Gulag Archipelago, a mass
incriminating documentation of the forced labour camps spread along
the rail network from the Arctic Solovetsky Islands to Kazakhstan.
Solzhenitsyn's recognition with the Nobel literature prize in
1970, historians suspect, saved him from being re-incarcerated and in
an unprecedented move he was expelled by KGB chief Yuri Andropov.
Russia's Vladimir Putin led condolences, calling his death 'a
heavy loss for the whole of Russia.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Nicolas Sarkozy,
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Mikhail Gorbachev, the
last Soviet President, were among those who remembered Solzhenitsyn
as Russia's moral conscience.
Russian newspapers' mourned Solzhenitsyn's passing with blitzing
headlines: 'A Prophet Has Died In His Homeland,' wrote popular daily
Komsomolskaya Pravda while tabloid Tvoi Den led in bold black
'Alexander The Great.'
On his homecoming in 1994, after 20 years in exile first in
Switzerland and the US state of Vermont, Putin awarded Solzhenitsyn
Russia's highest laurel in a pomp-filled Kremlin ceremony honouring
his devotion to the 'motherland.'
A devout Russian Orthodox Christian, distinguishable in his last
years by a full beard that covered his thinning face, Solzhenitsyn
will be buried according to his wishes in the 16th-century Donskoy
Monastery in Moscow at 9.00 am (0500 GMT) on Wednesday.
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