Moscow gets 'Solzhenitsyn Street'

Solzhenitsyn - ostracised in Soviet times - won praise in today's Russia

A Moscow street dedicated to the communists will be renamed in honour of former Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn, city officials say.

Great Communist Street (ulitsa Bolshaya Kommunisticheskaya), in the city centre, will become "Alexander Solzhenitsyn Street".

Solzhenitsyn, whose books exposed the human rights abuses committed by Stalin's regime, died on 3 August.

The Moscow street honour is in line with a decree from Russia's president.

The Moscow authorities decided to amend an existing rule stipulating that only people dead for at least 10 years can be honoured with a street name.

"Life has shown that there are cases when you don't need to wait 10 years to evaluate a person's contribution to the history of Russia and Moscow," said Moscow City Assembly Chairman Vladimir Platonov.

Officials will also put a memorial plaque on a building in the new "Alexander Solzhenitsyn Street", in Moscow's Taganka district. The change is scheduled for January.

Solzhenitsyn received the Nobel Prize for his painstaking work in chronicling the Stalinist dictatorship's abuses - especially the grim fate suffered by millions of people in the Gulag prison camps.

He was stripped of his Soviet citizenship and went into exile abroad, but returned to Russia in 1994, after the collapse of communism.

In many cases, Russian cities, towns and streets that had been renamed by the Soviet authorities reverted to their old pre-revolutionary names in the 1990s. The most prominent among them is St Petersburg (formerly Leningrad).