Solzhenitsyn

MOSCOW (AP):

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize-winning author whose books exposed and chronicled the vast network of Stalin's slave labour camps, has died of heart failure at age 89, his family said.

Solzhenitsyn's unflinching accounts of torment and survival in the Soviet Union's Gulag of camps riveted his countrymen, whose sad secret history he helped expose. They earned him 20 years of bitter exile, but international renown.

And they inspired millions, perhaps, with the knowledge that one person's courage and integrity could help defeat the totalitarian machinery of an empire.

The author's son, Stepan Solzhenitsyn, told The Associated Press his father died late Sunday of heart failure. His death inspired many tributes, none more important, perhaps, than from the man who dismantled the last of the Gulag camps in the 1980s, former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev.

"Solzhenitsyn's fate, as well as the fate of millions of the country's citizens, was befallen by severe trials,'' Gorbachev said, according to Interfax.

"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.''

His wife Natalya told Interfax her husband, who suffered along with millions of Russians in the prison camp system, died as he had hoped to die.

"He wanted to die in the summer - and he died in the summer,'' she said, according to Interfax. "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.''

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, a veteran of the Soviet KGB, nevertheless forged a close relationship with the fiercely patriotic Solzhenitsyn, who in a late interview in April 2007 accused NATO of trying to encircle Russia and strip it of its sovereignty. It is a charge frequently raised by Putin and his successor, President Dmitry Medvedev.

Solzhenitsyn's literary achievements, as well as ''the entire thorny path of his life,'' Putin said in a statement, ''will remain for us an example of genuine devotion and selfless serving to the people, fatherland and the ideals of freedom, justice and humanism.''