By RIA Novosti,
Moscow : The body of Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn was laid to rest at Moscow’s Donskoi monastery Wednesday in a ceremony attended by hundreds of people.
Solzhenitsyn, a Nobel laureate and former dissident, was buried at the monastery which is the resting place of many writers, poets and historians.
President Dmitry Medvedev attended the funeral service.
In signs reminiscent of a state funeral, a military band played and three salvoes were fired at the end of the burial ceremony.
Best known as the author of “The Gulag Archipelago” and “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”, dreadful accounts of Stalinist prison life, Solzhenitsyn fought in WWII, spent eight years in labour camps, survived cancer while still in prison, and lived abroad in forced exile for 20 years.
Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia in 1994 several years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. He died at his home near Moscow.