Monday, August 4, 2008

Russians mourn dissident hero Solzhenitsyn

Mon Aug 4, 2008 11:53am EDT
By Maria Golovnina

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russians on Monday mourned Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the author and dissident whose criticism of the tyranny of Soviet rule made him one of the bravest figures of the 20th century.

Solzhenitsyn, a Nobel literature laureate, died of heart failure late on Sunday in his Moscow home. He was 89.

On Monday, a chorus of voices across the world expressed grief at the death of a man whose struggle exposed the horror of Josef Stalin's camps and made him the conscience of Russia.

Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, described Solzhenitsyn as a "man of unique destiny whose name will remain in Russia's history."

"He was one of the first people who spoke up about the inhumanity of Stalin's regime with a full voice, and about the people whose lived through this but were not broken," Gorbachev, told Interfax news agency.

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