Gorbachev and Putin lead tributes to Solzhenitsyn

David Batty and agencies

The former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev and the former Russian president Vladimir Putin today led tributes to the Nobel-prize winning author and dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
Solzhenitsyn, whose books chronicled the horrors of the Soviet gulag system, died of heart failure last night, his son, Stepan, said. He was 89.
Gorbachev, who dismantled the last of the gulags in the 80s, described the internationally renowned writer as a "man of unique destiny whose name will remain in Russia's history".
"Solzhenitsyn's fate, as well as the fate of millions of the country's citizens, was befallen by severe trials," he told the Russian Interfax news agency.
"He was one of the first who spoke aloud about the inhuman Stalinist regime and about the people who experienced it but were not broken."
Putin, now the Russian prime minister, said in a statement that Solzhenitsyn's literary achievements, as well as "the entire thorny path of his life" would "remain for us an example of genuine devotion and selfless serving to the people, fatherland and the ideals of freedom, justice and humanism".
The Soviet KGB veteran forged a close relationship with the fiercely patriotic Solzhenitsyn, who last year accused Nato of trying to encircle Russia and strip it of its sovereignty.
The Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, and other world leaders including the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, and the US president, George Bush, also sent their condolences.
Solzhenitsyn's wife, Natalya, told Interfax that her husband, who suffered along with millions of Russians in the prison camp system, had died as he had hoped to die.
"He wanted to die in the summer, and he died in the summer," she said. "He wanted to die at home, and he died at home. In general, I should say that Alexander Isaevich lived a difficult but happy life."
The author's unflinching accounts of torment and survival in the Soviet Union's slave labour camps riveted his compatriots, whose secret history he exposed.
His writings brought him international renown, making him one of the most prominent dissidents of the Soviet era and a symbol of intellectual resistance to communist rule, but also resulted in 20 years of exile.
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 camps, where tens of millions perished.
Last year, Solzhenitsyn was awarded the state prize, one of Russia's highest honours.
In announcing the award, Yury Osipov, the president of the Russian Academy of Sciences, called him "the author of works without which the history of the 20th century is unthinkable".
His experience in the labour camps was described in his short novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
His major works, including The First Circle and Cancer Ward, brought him global admiration and the 1970 Nobel prize for literature.
Stripped of his citizenship and sent into exile in 1974 after the publication of the Gulag Archipelago, he settled in the US.
But in 1989, Gorbachev allowed the publication of Solzhenitsyn's works as part of his perestroika reforms, restoring his Soviet citizenship and enabling him to return as a hero in 1994.
Writers around the world paid tribute to Solzhenitsyn.
JM Coetzee, the South African author and a fellow Nobel laureate, described him as "a colossus of our times" and "a great Russian patriot".
"Alexander Solzhenitsyn was ... a man of immense personal courage and, as a writer, the one indisputable heir of Tolstoy," he said.
The Australian author Thomas Keneally said: "Stalin once said: 'One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic.' In his books, Solzhenitsyn managed to reduce the horror of the Stalinist regime to a human and palpable level."
Keneally, the author of the Booker prize-winning novel Schindler's Ark, described Solzhenitsyn's works as "of the highest order" and "acutely memorable".
"His books came out of intense human suffering and, in my opinion, that is one of the reasons why he deserved his Nobel prize," he said.
"All Solzhenitsyn's great work was instigated by his experience of tyranny. Personal freedom, once he got it, didn't give him a lot to write about.
"That was, I suppose, because in his way he was a creation of the Soviet system; that was his subject matter.
"There is the question of what do you do in a place that is giving you shelter but is not really yours?"