Solzhenitsyn dies aged 89

The soviet dissident and Nobel literature prize winner Alexander Solzhenitsyn has died at the age of 89. His son Stepan said he had died at home of heart failure. Solzhenitsyn's expose of the gulags, where tens of millions perished, cost him 20 years in exile during which he became one of the best known Soviet dissidents.

His experience in the labour camps was described in unflinching detail in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, but his greatest work was The Gulag Archipelago, written in secrecy and published abroad in three volumes. He returned to the Soviet Union a hero in 1994, and was last year awarded the state prize, one of Russia's highest honours.