Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was borne to his grave yesterday by an honour guard of Russian soldiers as the words of the hymn Eternal Memory echoed around the Donskoi monastery in Moscow. With President Medvedev following the Nobel laureate’s open coffin, the funeral of the dissident writer combined the rich traditions of his beloved Orthodox Church with the trappings of a formal state farewell.

His widow Natalya threw a handful of soil into his grave and made the sign of the cross over the coffin at the end of a four-hour service. The funeral was broadcast live on state television.

Hundreds of mourners laid flowers and kissed the plain wooden cross on his grave. One placed a copy of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich at the foot of the cross. The book’s publication in 1962 catapulted Solzhenitsyn to fame with its harrowing exposé of life in the Soviet Gulag.

A military band played a funeral march and soldiers fired a three-gun salute as Solzhenitsyn was laid to rest. The author had chosen his grave five years earlier after requesting permission from Patriarch Aleksei II to be buried in the grounds of the 16th-century monastery.

Times Archive 1976: Alexander Solzhenitsyn's warning to the West

We, the oppressed peoples of Russia, watch with anguish the enfeeblement of Europe

• Leading article: The warning and the hope

• Nobel award to disgraced writer

• Solzhenitsyn expelled from Russia

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A monument to the victims of repression stands outside the monastery, beside a crematorium that was used by the Communists to incinerate the bodies of thousands of political prisoners killed in the KGB’s notorious Lubyanka and Butyrka prisons.

Mr Medvedev cut short a holiday to stand with Solzhenitsyn’s family inside the Great Cathedral of the Don Mother of God. Incense hung in the air as white-robed priests sang the liturgy beside Solzhenitsyn’s coffin in the centre of the cathedral under a giant gold chandelier.

Mr Medvedev laid red roses at Solzhenitsyn’s feet, while friends and relatives leant over to kiss the writer’s forehead.

Mourners filled the cathedral and overflowed into the grounds of the monastery, singing prayers for the man whom they regarded as a beacon of truth against the Stalinist repression that touched millions of families.

Vladimir Putin, the Prime Minister, former President and KGB spy, did not attend the funeral. After paying his respects at Tuesday’s wake, however, he ordered the Russian Education Minister to ensure that Solzhenitsyn’s books were taught prominently in schools and universities.

Mr Medvedev issued a decree yesterday ordering the Government to establish Solzhenitsyn scholarships for college and university students from next year. A street in Moscow will also be named after the writer.

Solzhenitsyn died of heart failure on Sunday, aged 89. He spent eight years in the Gulag and three in internal exile after being accused of insulting Stalin in a letter to a schoolfriend after the Second World War. He was the first to expose the cruelty of the labour camps in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which caused a sensation when an edited version was published in the Soviet Union in 1962 during the brief cultural thaw under Nikita Khrushchev.

Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970, a move denounced by the Soviet regime as an act of political hostility. Solzhenitsyn was expelled and stripped of his citizenship in 1974 soon after the first part of The Gulag Archipelago appeared in the West.

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