Soviet dissident writer dies at 89

By Oleg Shchedrov

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Soviet dissident writer and Nobel literature prize winner who revealed the horror of Stalin's camps to the world, died late on Sunday aged 89, Russian news agencies reported.

Itar-Tass news agency quoted Solzhenitsyn's son Stepan as saying the writer died of heart failure in his home outside Moscow at 11:45 p.m. (8:45 p.m. British time). Interfax news agency quoted literary sources as saying Solzhenitsyn died of a stroke.

"President Dmitry Medvedev expressed his condolences to Solzhenitsyn's family," a Kremlin spokesman said. Members of the writer's family could not be contacted immediately.

For more than 20 years, the bearded World War Two veteran, who spent eight years in Stalin's camps for criticising the Soviet dictator, became a symbol of intellectual resistance to the Communist rule.

His monumental work "The Gulag Archipelago", written in secrecy in the Soviet Union and published in Paris in three volumes between 1973 and 1978, is the definitive work on Stalin's forced labour camps, where tens of millions perished.

A short-lived policy of de-Stalinisation by the then Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev made possible the publication in 1962 of Solzhenitsyn's "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich", which described the horrifying routine of labour camp life.

Other literary works, including a series of historical novels and political pamphlets, were banned from publication in the Soviet Union, where their distribution was made a criminal offence.

Major works including "The First Circle" and "Cancer Ward" brought Solzhenitsyn world admiration and the Nobel Literature Prize in 1970.