In life he was persecuted by a regime whose horrors he exposed to the world as one of the Soviet Union’s foremost dissidents. Yesterday, in death, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was praised by the Kremlin hierarchy as Russia’s moral guiding light out of the communist tyranny that claimed millions of lives in the Gulag labour camps.

Their tributes were echoed world-wide for a man whose flowing beard and stern visage seemed to personify the struggle to rescue Russian culture from Stalinist destruction.

President Medvedev described the Nobel laureate as one of the greatest thinkers and writers of the 20th century, calling his death on Sunday aged 89 an irreparable loss for Russia and the world. “He served his country as a true citizen and patriot and devoted himself with all his heart to the fate of the Russian people,” Mr Medvedev said. “His name will be bound forever to Russia’s destiny.”

Vladimir Putin, the Prime Minister, who served in the KGB that hounded the writer into exile for “antiSoviet” activities, said Russians were proud of Solzhenitsyn. “His entire long, thorny life journey will remain for us a model of true devotion, selfless service to the people, motherland, the ideals of freedom, justice and humanism.”

Times Archive, 1976: Warning to the West

We offer you the experience of our suffering; we would like you to accept it without having to pay the monstrous price of death and slavery

• Leading article: The warning and the hope

• Solzhenitsyn expelled from Russia

• Nobel award to disgraced writer

Related Links

• Writer was first to break wall of silence

• Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

• A lone voice willing to speak the truth at any cost

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• Pictures: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

• Times Archive 1974: Solzhenitsyn is expelled

Mikhail Gorbachev, who restored Solzhenitsyn’s citizenship as the last leader of the Soviet Union, said that the writer had played a vital role in defeating the totalitarian regime. His books had “changed the minds of millions of people”.

Solzhenitsyn died of heart failure at his home on the outskirts of Moscow, 14 years after he had returned to Russia in triumph from exile in the United States. His son Stepan said: “He worked yesterday just like any other day. Then in the evening, death came quickly . . . I am in mourning but I also express gratitude to everyone who will remember this moment.”

Thousands of people are expected to pay their respects at a lying-in-state today at the Russian Academy of Sciences before his funeral tomorrow at Donskoye cemetery in Moscow. His widow Natalya told Echo Moskvy radio: “He wanted to die in summer and died in summer. He wanted to die at home and he died at home. Alexander Isayevich lived a difficult but happy life.”

Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, who grew up in communist East Germany, said that Solzhenitsyn’s work had played “a decisive role in bringing down the communist totalitarian system”. President Sarkozy of France called him an heir to Dostoyevsky and “one of the greatest consciences of 20th-century Russia”. Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970 after writing in harrowing detail about the Soviet labour camps in works such as One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The Gulag Archipelago.

He was a strong believer in Russia’s special destiny and mission in the world, a view adopted by Mr Putin to justify his increasingly abrasive attitude to the West. Solzhenitsyn’s relationship with Mr Putin was one of the most intriguing ironies of his later life. It disappointed human rights activists in Russia who accused Mr Putin of restoring an authoritarian regime.

He acknowledged Mr Putin’s past as a KGB spy in an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel last year, but said: “He was not a KGB investigator, nor was he the head of a camp in the Gulag. As for service in foreign intelligence, that is not a negative in any country.”

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