Soviet Dissident Writer Solzhenitsyn Dies at 89.

MOSCOW — 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. (1945 GMT). 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.