Aleksander Solzhenitsyn Dead at 89

[viking]

Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, the Soviet dissident writer and Nobel literature prize winner, has died aged 89, the Interfax news agency reported on Sunday.

He died of a stroke, the agency said, quoting literary sources in Moscow.

Solzhenitsyn served with the Red Army in World War II but became one of the most prominent dissidents of the Soviet era, enduring labor camps, cancer and persecution by Soviet officialdom

His experience in the network of labor camps was vividly described in his "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich."

His major works, including "The First Circle" and "Cancer Ward" brought him world admiration and the 1970 Nobel Literature Prize.

Stripped of his citizenship and sent into exile in 1974 after the publication of "The Gulag Archipelago," his monumental history of the Soviet police state, the writer settled in the United States, returning to post-Soviet Russia as a hero in 1994.

He was born on Dec. 11, 1918, studied physics and mathematics at Rostov University and became a Soviet army officer after Hitler's invasion in 1941.