Nobel Prize-winning Russian writer and dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn has been buried in Moscow.
The service was held in the historic Donskoy Monastery and was attended by President Dmitry Medvedev.
The iconic writer, who spent eight years in the Gulag prison camps before devoting his life to documenting the horrors of Soviet rule, was buried in a ceremony broadcast live on national television.
Mr Solzhenitsyn died of heart failure at his Moscow home on Sunday at the age of 89, prompting a stream of condolence messages from Russian and world leaders for a man credited with helping undermine Soviet power.
He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1970 and is best known for his massive study of the labour camps, ‘The Gulag Archipelago,’ as well as novels like ‘One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich’ and ‘The First Circle.’
He was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974 after the authorities found a manuscript of ‘The Gulag Archipelago.’
The Soviet Union's last leader Mikhail Gorbachev eventually restored his citizenship in 1990.
After returning to Russia from the United States in 1994 on an emotional train journey across Siberia, the author eventually retired into seclusion to focus on his writing and was rarely seen during his final years.
