Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who exposed Stalin's prison system in his novels and spent 20 years in exile, has died near Moscow at the age of 89.
The author of The Gulag Archipelago and One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich, who returned to Russia in 1994, died of either a stroke or heart failure.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy described him as "one of the greatest consciences of 20th Century Russia".
"His intransigence, his ideals and his long, eventful life make of Solzhenitsyn a storybook figure, heir to Dostoyevsky," he said in a statement.
It is time, in the West, to defend not so much human rights as human obligations - Alexander Solzhenitsyn
