Anti-Stalin legend Alexander Solzhenitsyn dies at 89

[Copper]

Writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who won the Nobel prize for his powerful novels about life under Stalin's tyrannical regime, died last night aged 89.

He had a heart attack at his home in Moscow after being seriously ill for months.

His series of novels laid bare the inhumanity at the heart of the Soviet system - and made him the most famous dissident of his age in the West.

One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich, published in 1963 at the height of the Cold War, gave a graphic account of the hardships and cruelties endured by those imprisoned in Stalin's labour camps.

The book was largely autobiographical. He was arrested in 1945 while serving in the Russian army for criticising Stalin in a letter to a friend. He was sent to camp in Kazakhstan after being sentenced to eight years.

Solzhenitsyn's main work was the massive Gulag Archipelago. Published in the West in 1973, it described the years of Stalinist terror by telling of thousands of individual cases in minute detail.

As his fame grew, he became an increasing embarrassment to the Kremlin and in 1974 he was charged with treason, deported to Germany and stripped of his Soviet citizenship.

He eventually moved to America, settling in Vermont. But his reactionary political and religious views alienated the American academics and intellectuals who had previously been his biggest fans.

Solzhenitsyn also loathed what he saw as the West's obsession with popular culture and commercialism.

So after Mikhail Gorbachev restored Solzhenitsyn's citizenship in 1994 and dropped the treason charge, he returned home.

His final years were spent working on a series of novels about the Russian revolution and promoting the orthodox church.