Moscow - Dissident Soviet writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn was
laid to rest with a three-gun salute on Wednesday in an elaborate
religious service attended by President Dmitry Medvedev at Moscow's
16th-century Donskoy Monastery.
The funeral procession, which was broadcast live on national
television, held all the trappings of a state burial with goose-
stepping guards encircling Solzhenitsyn's coffin.
Several hundred Russians followed behind a black-and-white
portrait of the iconic writer, pictured with the full-Orthodox beard
that hid his thinning face in his last years.
At his grave, white-gowned priests chanted and swung thuribles, or
incense-burners, over his open casket and mourners crossed
themselves.
A solemn Medvedev offered his condolences to Solzhenistyn's
tearful widow Natalya and sons as the coffin was slowly lowered into
a small plot at the side of the rose-colored monastery walls.
Solzhnitsyn, who is remembered as Russia's moral conscience for
his exposure of the brutality of the gulags where he spent eight
years, died Sunday aged 89.
He won the Nobel Prize in 1970 for his monumental documentation
of the Soviet Union's forced labour camps in The Gulag Archipelago
and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, but he refused to leave
the country fearing he would be barred from returning.
But three years later the KGB redoubled its efforts to silence
public mention of the gulags, and he was expelled from his homeland
and stripped of his citizenship.
Many mourners at his grave were old enough to remember the shock-
wave that hit the authoritarian society with the publication of his
first memoirs.
'I was fourteen years old when I was given an illegal copy of
Solzhenitsyn, but that forever changed my view of the world,' said
Lars Peter Schmidt, 40, who grew up in Communist East Germany and now
runs a national political foundation.
'We read his books at night, in secret, and as fast as possible so
we could pass them on to others ... but we will never forget them,'
Masha Lipman, a Russian political scientist with the Moscow Carnegie
Centre, said.
The iconic writer remained an unfailing Russian patriot, who
prayed to be buried at home during his long years of exile.
Though finding Russia alien and largely indifferent to his work on
his homecoming in 1994, he lived in seclusion and preached a return
to Christian values.
A devout Russian Orthodox Christian, Solzhenitsyn chose Donskoy
Monastery as his final resting place five years ago, asking special
permission from the Moscow Patriarchy to be buried there.
The Nobel writer said he felt 'many spiritual links' to Donskoy
monastery which hosts the graves of numerous other Russian dissidents
writers and artists.
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 paid tribute to
Solzhenitsyn this week.
'Solzhenitsyn's role was absolutely unique. It seemed there were
moments in his life when he threw down a challenge to destiny itself
and destiny receded before him,' Russian human rights commissioner
Vladimir Lukin said after the funeral.
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