Russia pays Solzhenitsyn respects

Solzhenitsyn is due to be buried in a ceremony on Wednesday

Russians have been paying their last respects to writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who died on Sunday at the age of 89.

The open coffin of Solzhenitsyn, whose books revealed the horrors of Stalin's regime, is lying in state at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow.

People bearing flowers filed past the coffin making the sign of the cross.

His body will be buried in an Orthodox ceremony at the 16th Century Donskoi Monastery in the capital on Wednesday.

The writer's wife Natalya and his two sons, Stepan and Yermolai, stood near to the coffin as mourners walked through the cavernous hall to lay long-stemmed flowers at the foot of the casket.

The author of The Gulag Archipelago and One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich died of heart failure on Sunday at his home near Moscow.

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Mourners file past Alexander Solzhenitsyn's open coffin

Solzhenitsyn had returned to Russia in 1994, following two decades in exile in the West.

The mourners included Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who embraced Solzhenitsyn's wife as he passed the coffin.

In later televised remarks, Mr Putin said: "Through his works and his entire life he inoculated our society against tyranny in all its forms."

He called for Solzhenitsyn's works to become an important part of the Russian school curriculum.

The Soviet Union's last leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, was also in attendance. He said: "[Solzhenitsyn] was a free spirit. I respected him a lot even though we had our differences."

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One mourner, holding a copy of one of Solzhenitsyn's most famous texts and a bunch of white flowers, told AFP news agency that the writer's death had come as a shock.

"I came here because in the 1970s, I read this one little book that completely changed everything for me... When I heard the news yesterday, it was a terrible blow for me," said 64-year-old Sergei Aristarkhov.

News of the Nobel laureate's death prompted tributes in Russia and around the world.

Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who restored Solzhenitsyn's citizenship in 1990 and whose reforms helped end communism, said the writer had played a key role in undermining Stalin's totalitarian regime.

His works "changed the consciousness of millions of people", Mr Gorbachev said.

France's President Nicolas Sarkozy described him as "one of the greatest consciences of 20th-Century Russia" and praised his intransigence and ideals in the face of personal danger.

Soldier, prisoner, celebrity

Solzhenitsyn served as a Soviet artillery officer in World War II and was decorated for his courage, but in 1945 was denounced for criticising Stalin in a letter.

ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSYN Born: 11 December 1918 1945: sentenced to eight years for anti-Soviet activities 1962: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich published in Russia 1970: Awarded Nobel Prize for Literature 1974: First volume of The Gulag Archipelago published 13 February 1974: Exiled from his native Russia 1994: Returns to Russia 3 August 2008: dies in Moscow In his own words Obituary In pictures: Russia pays respects

He spent the next eight years in the Soviet prison system, or Gulag, before being internally exiled to Kazakhstan, where he was successfully treated for stomach cancer.

Publication in 1962 of the novella Denisovich, an account of a day in a Gulag prisoner's life, made him a celebrity during the post-Stalin political thaw.

However, within a decade, the writer awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize for Literature was out of favour again for his work, and was being harassed by the KGB secret police.

In 1973, the first of the three volumes of Archipelago, a detailed account of the systematic Soviet abuses from 1918 to 1956 in the vast network of its prison and labour camps, was published in the West.

Its publication sparked a furious backlash in the Soviet press, which denounced him as a traitor.

Early in 1974, the Soviet authorities stripped him of his citizenship and expelled him from the country.

He settled in Vermont, in the US, where he completed the other two volumes of Archipelago.

While living there as a recluse, he railed against what he saw as the moral corruption of the West.

Scathing of Boris Yeltsin's brand of democracy, he did not return to Russia immediately upon the collapse of the USSR in 1992, unlike other exiles, but made a dramatic homecoming in 1994.