Dissident writer Solzhenitsyn laid to rest (Roundup)

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.