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President Dmitri Medvedev, left, and Yermolai Solzhenitsyn, Alexander Solzhenitsyn's son, right, are seen during funeral service in Moscow, 06 Aug 2008
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Russian Nobel Laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the dissident author whose writing exposed the horrors of Soviet-era slave labor, has been buried at a historic Moscow cemetery.
Solzhenitsyn, who died Sunday at age 89, was laid to rest Wednesday on the grounds of the 16th-century Donskoi monastery alongside other famous Russian cultural figures.
Russian President Dmitri Medvedev joined hundreds of mourners and a host of Orthodox clergy, for a funeral ceremony with all of the trappings of a state funeral, including a military band and honor guards. Solzhenitsyn lay in an open casket with a wooden cross on his chest.
Russians came out in a heavy rain Tuesday to file past Solzhenitsyn's open casket at the country's Academy of Sciences. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin was among the mourners, speaking briefly with Solzhenitsyn's widow and sons.
Solzhenitsyn won global recognition in 1962 with his novel ˇ°One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,ˇ± based on his experiences in Soviet prison camps in the 1940s and 50s. He won the 1970 Nobel Prize for Literature, but was stripped of his citizenship and driven into exile four years later after ˇ°The Gulag Archipelagoˇ± was printed in the West.
Solzhenitsyn eventually settled in the United States and wrote about what he thought was the moral decline and obsessive materialism of the West.
He returned to Russia in 1994.
VOA News
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