Russian Nobel Prize-winning author Alexander Solzhenitsyn dies

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize-winning author whose books chronicled the horrors of the Soviet gulag system, has died at age 89, his son said on Monday. Stepan Solzhenitsyn told The Associated Press his father died late on Sunday of heart failure, but declined to comment further.

Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn was born on 11 December 1918 in Kislovodsk, in Southern Russia. In his youth he was a devoted Communist, but in 1943 while serving as a captain in the front line he was arrested for writing a letter critical of Josef Stalin.

He spent seven years in a labor camp on the barren steppes of Kazakhstan, and then three more years in internal exile. While in exile he began to write in secret, and continued writing while working a teacher of mathematics in the city of Ryazan.

His debut novel, called One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich tells the story of a former service man struggling to survive with his moral dignity intact in a Siberian labour camp. The book was published on the authority of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, who was eager to discredit the times of his predecessor Joseph Stalin.

Solzhenitsyn's book caused a sensation both in his own country and abroad not because it was the first book to deal with Stalin's Terror, but because it seemed to indict the whole system of Communism, rather than just Stalin.

After Khrushchev was replaced by Kremlin conservatives in 1964 the writer was then faced with KGB harassment. Publication of his works in the USSR was blocked, but he used secret channels to publish them in the West.

Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1970 for "the ethnical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature". But he was able to receive it only in 1973 after he had been expelled from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) to Western Germany. The same year his famous Gulag Archipelago was published in Paris, describing the history of the Soviet system of state terror.

Solzhenitsyn made his new home in America, where he settled in the tiny town of Cavendish, Vermont with his wife and sons. They spent 18-years there, a period which the writer called the most productive of his life. There he worked on what he considered to be his life work, a multi-volume saga of Russian history titled The Red Wheel.

Although free from repression, Solzhenitsyn appeared to miss his native country and offended many by criticising the West for materialism and lack of spirituality.

Many critics saw The Red Wheel books as tedious and hectoring, rather than as sweeping and lit by moral fire. The way was cleared for his return when Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev restored his citizenship in 1990. Following an emotional homecoming in the Russian Far East on May 1994, Solzhenitsyn settled in a red brick house on the bank of the Moscow river outside the capital. The return did not make the old writer closer to beloved Russia.

Despised by Communists for his opposition to Soviet power, he found himself also distrusted by reformers. His weekly programme on the nation's biggest TV channel was quickly dropped as it made little evident impact on the country.

In September 2000 those who used to see Solzhenitsyn as a tough enemy of the Soviet way of life were astonished by favourable statements he made about then Russian President Vladimir Putin, a one-time officer of the KGB that persecuted him. But in his old age Solzhenitsyn also showed himself still marshalling memorable words to fight for human dignity and his homeland.

"We literally exist among ruins, but pretend to have a normal life", he said in May 2002. "We can only build something strong and healthy from the bottom up, as all things grow in nature".