Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn dies aged 89
Updated
![Reports say Nobel prize winning author Alexander Solzhenitsyn died from a stroke. [AFP]](http://www.radioaustralia.net.au/img/news/base/russia_solzhenitsyn_afp_file.jpg "Reports say Nobel prize winning author Alexander Solzhenitsyn died from a stroke. [AFP]")
Reports say Nobel prize winning author Alexander Solzhenitsyn died from a stroke. [AFP]
The Soviet dissident writer and Nobel prize winner, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, has died aged 89 in his home outside Moscow.
A Kremlin spokesman says Russia's President Dmitry Medvedev expresses his condolences to Solzhenitsyn's family.
For more than 20 years, the writer, who spent eight years in Stalin's camps for criticising the dictator, became a symbol of intellectual resistance to Communist rule.
His monumental work "The Gulag Archipelago", written in secrecy in the Soviet Union and published in Paris between 1973 and 1978, is the definitive work on Stalin's forced labour camps, where tens of millions perished.
As a result, he was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974, and lived in Germany, Switzerland and the United States before returning to Russia in 1994, following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
