Times Archive 1976: Alexander Solzhenitsyn's warning to the WestWe, the oppressed peoples of Russia, watch with anguish the enfeeblement of Europe
The body of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn lies in an open coffin during his funeral, at the Donskoye Monastery, in Moscow, which was broadcast on Russian state television (Yuri Kochetkov/AP) 
Solzhenitsyn spent eight years in labour camps from 1945, for criticising Stalin. On his release in 1953, he was sent into internal exile in Kazakhstan (AP Photo)
An army officer carries a portrait of Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn dring his funeral service at the Donskoye Monastery in Moscow (Yuri Kochetkov/EPA)
Russians paid their last respects at a lying-in-state for Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn at the Russian Academy of Sciences (Dmitry Kostyukov/AFP/Getty Images)
Solzhenitsyn's widow, Natalya Solzhenitsyna, caresses her husband's forehead during his lying in state. Mourners, mainly elderly Russians, filed past the author's open coffin (Sergey Shakhidjanian/AFP/Getty) 
Vladimir Putin, the Russian Prime Minister, lays flowers at the foot of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's coffin. The author and the former president shared a strong belief in Russia's special destiny (Dmitry Kostyukov/AFP/Getty)
A Russian honour guard escorted Solzhenitsyn's coffin as a military band played a funeral march and soldiers fired a three-gun salute as the writer was laid to rest (Dmitry Kostyukov/AFP/Getty Images)
A Russian honour guard escorted Solzhenitsyn's coffin as a military band played a funeral march and soldiers fired a three-gun salute as the writer was laid to rest (Dmitry Kostyukov/AFP/Getty Images)
The Russian, President Dmitry Medvedev, lays flowers at the grave of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in the grounds of the 16th-century Donskoye Monastery (Yuri Kochetkov/Reuters) 
President Medvedev, front left, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's son Yermolai, right, lead the mourners at the Russian Orthodox church service (Yuri Kochetkov/Reuters) Tony Halpin in Moscow
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was borne to his grave yesterday by an honour guard of Russian soldiers as the words of the hymn Eternal Memory echoed around the Donskoi monastery in Moscow. With President Medvedev following the Nobel laureate’s open coffin, the funeral of the dissident writer combined the rich traditions of his beloved Orthodox Church with the trappings of a formal state farewell.
His widow Natalya threw a handful of soil into his grave and made the sign of the cross over the coffin at the end of a four-hour service. The funeral was broadcast live on state television.
Hundreds of mourners laid flowers and kissed the plain wooden cross on his grave. One placed a copy of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich at the foot of the cross. The book’s publication in 1962 catapulted Solzhenitsyn to fame with its harrowing exposé of life in the Soviet Gulag.
A military band played a funeral march and soldiers fired a three-gun salute as Solzhenitsyn was laid to rest. The author had chosen his grave five years earlier after requesting permission from Patriarch Aleksei II to be buried in the grounds of the 16th-century monastery.
A monument to the victims of repression stands outside the monastery, beside a crematorium that was used by the Communists to incinerate the bodies of thousands of political prisoners killed in the KGB’s notorious Lubyanka and Butyrka prisons.
Mr Medvedev cut short a holiday to stand with Solzhenitsyn’s family inside the Great Cathedral of the Don Mother of God. Incense hung in the air as white-robed priests sang the liturgy beside Solzhenitsyn’s coffin in the centre of the cathedral under a giant gold chandelier.
Mr Medvedev laid red roses at Solzhenitsyn’s feet, while friends and relatives leant over to kiss the writer’s forehead.
Mourners filled the cathedral and overflowed into the grounds of the monastery, singing prayers for the man whom they regarded as a beacon of truth against the Stalinist repression that touched millions of families.
Vladimir Putin, the Prime Minister, former President and KGB spy, did not attend the funeral.
After paying his respects at Tuesday’s wake, however, he ordered the Russian Education Minister to ensure that Solzhenitsyn’s books were taught prominently in schools and universities.
Mr Medvedev issued a decree yesterday ordering the Government to establish Solzhenitsyn scholarships for college and university students from next year. A street in Moscow will also be named after the writer.
Solzhenitsyn died of heart failure on Sunday, aged 89. He spent eight years in the Gulag and three in internal exile after being accused of insulting Stalin in a letter to a schoolfriend after the Second World War. He was the first to expose the cruelty of the labour camps in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which caused a sensation when an edited version was published in the Soviet Union in 1962 during the brief cultural thaw under Nikita Khrushchev.
Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970, a move denounced by the Soviet regime as an act of political hostility. Solzhenitsyn was expelled and stripped of his citizenship in 1974 soon after the first part of The Gulag Archipelago appeared in the West.
Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, restored his citizenship in 1990 and he returned to Russia from the United States in 1994. Solzhenitsyn attacked the corruption and chaos of the new Russia under President Yeltsin but he never regained the influence that he had enjoyed in exile.
Solzhenitsyn became an increasingly peripheral figure in his final years and attracted criticism from some human rights activists for his support of President Putin’s efforts to restore Russia’s prestige. Mr Putin presented Solzhenitsyn with Russia’s highest honour, the State Prize, last year, thanking him for “all your work for the good of Russia”. As with the lying in state on Tuesday, the overwhelming majority of mourners at yesterday’s funeral were elderly people who could remember the impact of Solzhenitsyn’s books on the Soviet system. Valeri Borshchev, a human rights lawyer, said: “The totalitarian regime fell thanks in large part to him. Thanks to him, the people understood that they themselves could oppose evil.”
The leader of the banned National Bolshevik party, Eduard Limonov, was among mourners who lit a candle for Solzhenitsyn as the service was taking place. It was probably the closest that Mr Limonov, one of the leaders of the anti-Putin movement The Other Russia, and President Medvedev had ever been to each other. But the politics of post-Soviet Russia were set aside for the day as one of the country’s 20th-century greats was laid to rest.
Ekaterina Markova, a writer and friend of Solzhenitsyn, said: “Solzhenitsyn served only God. Not the Government, not democracy, not even America. Only God, that’s why he was a free person.”
Among artists and dissidents
Graves in the Donskoi monastery include:
1834 Italian Neo-Classical architect Joseph Bové
1856 Philosopher Pyotr Chaadayev, who was censored for his outspoken criticism of Russia
1882 Vasili Perov, the Russian Realist painter
1883 Ivan Turgenev, right, the author of Fathers and Sons
1911 Vasili Klyuchevsky, credited with bringing an economic and geographical dimension to the understanding of Russia’s history
1921 Nikolai Zhukovsky, first scientist to explain aerodynamic lift mathematically
1940 Vsevolod Meyerhold, dynamic theatre director who was shot by the Stalin regime
Source: http://www.muar.ru/
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