The author of The Gulag Archipelago and One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich had been suffering from high blood pressure, and his son Stepan was reported by a Russian news agency as having said that his father died of heart failure. However, other sources claim the cause of death was a stroke.
The writer’s son made a statement saying that his father Alexander Solzhenitsyn had died on Sunday at his home near Moscow, where he had lived with his wife Natalya.
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev is said to have sent his condolences to Solzhenitsyn’s family.
Solzhenitsyn had been an artillery officer in World War II and was decorated for his service but then in 1945 he was denounced because he had criticised Stalin in a letter.
For anti-Soviet activities, for the next eight years, Solzhenitsyn was held as a prisoner in the Gulag, before being exiled to Kazakhstan, where he was treated for stomach cancer.
Later on in 1973, the first three volumes of Archipelago, which depicted the horrors of the Russian prison and labour camps, was published in the West, however following a backlash in the Soviet press, he was again denounced as a traitor, and in 1974, the Soviet authorities stripped him of his citizenship and threw him out of the country.
Solzhenitsyn went to live in Vermont, in America, where he finished the other two volumes of the Archipelago series.
