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Solzhenitsyn is buried in Moscow | |
(1 day later) | |
The body of Russian writer and dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn has been laid to rest at a funeral service held at Moscow's Donskoi monastery. | |
President Dmitry Medvedev joined the writer's family, friends and hundreds of mourners at the monastery's cathedral, near the city centre. | |
Solzhenitsyn's writing exposed Stalin's prison system and earned him 20 years in exile from the former Soviet Union. | Solzhenitsyn's writing exposed Stalin's prison system and earned him 20 years in exile from the former Soviet Union. |
He died on Sunday of heart failure at his home near Moscow, aged 89. | |
Before entering the church to attend the service on Wednesday morning, Yuri Luzhkov, mayor of the Russian capital, said: "He was one of our strongest personalities, a unique person." | |
Inside, Mr Solzhenitsyn's widow, Natalya, her sons and the rest of the Solzhenitsyn family sat in the front row of the church where more than 100 people had crowded | |
The Nobel prize-winning author lay in an open coffin with a wooden cross on his chest, surrounded by hundreds of candles. | |
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The funeral service took place at Moscow's Donskoi monastery cathedral | |
After the service, priests followed the coffin outside the cathedral, chanting and singing, before a gun salute was fired and a military band played as the coffin was lowered into the grave. | |
Mrs Solzhenitsyn and her sons then scattered handfuls of earth over the coffin, before it was covered over, leaving one large black and white photograph as a final memory at the graveside. | |
Solzhenitsyn had sought special permission to be buried at Donskoi monastery - the final resting place of a number of poets, philosophers and historians, many leading anti-Soviet figures - from the Russian Orthodox Church leadership, reports say. | |
Chronicler of horrors | |
Thousands of mourners had paid tribute to the writer as his body lay in state inside the Russian Academy of Sciences. | |
A night-long vigil was then held on Tuesday. | |
Among those who paid their respects was former Russian President Vladimir Putin. In the Soviet era, he was an officer in the KGB secret police. | |
In later televised remarks, Mr Putin said: "Through his works and his entire life he inoculated our society against tyranny in all its forms." | |
The author of The Gulag Archipelago and One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich, Alexander Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia from exile in 1994. |
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