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— Author Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who exposed the horrors of Soviet slave labor camps, was buried Wednesday in a cemetery filled with evocations of Communist cruelty and the fight against it that defined his life.
Solzhenitsyn's death Sunday at age 89 silenced one of Russia's most influential figures, a man regarded by mourners as critical in destroying the Soviet Union. His funeral and burial at Moscow's Donskoi Monastery offered evidence of his renown — the Russian president was there as military honor guards fired rifles in salute and white-robed priests sang dirges.
Throughout the chilly morning, mourners, many bearing carnations and roses, flowed into the monastery's main church where the Nobel literature laureate lay in an open casket.
A day earlier, thousands turned out in the rain to pay their last respects to Solzhenitsyn at a wake at the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Most of the mourners appeared old enough to remember the impact of Solzhenitsyn's "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," an unflinching description of a Gulag slave labor camp. Its publication in 1962, during a brief period of relaxed censorship, was the first officially sanctioned account of the system's brutality.
"The totalitarian regime fell thanks in large part to him. Thanks to him, the people understood that they themselves could oppose evil," said Valery Borshchev, a human-rights lawyer who was among the mourners.
But the regime did not fall until after Solzhenitsyn endured years of harassment by the KGB and was forced into bitter exile in the West.
The graveyards at the monastery have, over the past few years, become the final resting spot for other renowned anti-communist exiles, including White Army General Anton Denikin and philosopher Ivan Ilyich.
Solzhenitsyn asked five years ago to be buried at Donskoi, news reports said. Why he chose it is unclear — with his renown he surely would have been eligible for Moscow's showpiece Novodyevichy Cemetery.
But the monastery has its own history of repression and suffering that echoes Solzhenitsyn's. After the Bolshevik Revolution, the Russian Orthodox Church's leader, Patriarch Tikhon, was imprisoned there until his death in 1925. Four years later, a Museum of Atheism was established on the grounds.
The monastery later became a repository for the fragments of famous buildings destroyed by the Soviets, including pieces of Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Savior that was blown up to make way for a planned building to be topped by a gargantuan statue of Vladimir Lenin. In a particularly harsh demonstration of the Soviets' contempt for religion, a church in one of the monastery's cemeteries was turned into a crematorium. Cremation is abhorred by Orthodox believers.
But the monastery also has been a place of resistance. Stalin's daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, was secretly baptized there, according to the ITAR-Tass news agency.
President Dmitry Medvedev issued a decree Wednesday to create a scholarship fund in Solzhenitsyn's honor and ordered the Moscow city government to rename a street after the author, citing "the timeless meaning of his work."
For young Russians, many of whom have no memory of Soviet life, Solzhenitsyn seems a stern figure from a bygone age.
Though few young Russians came to the funeral, 20-year-old engineering student Liza Gorshenina said she felt moved to attend because she was touched by Solzhenitsyn's descriptions of engineers in his 1968 novel "The First Circle."
Gorshenina said seeing Solzhenitsyn in his open casket in the monastery's main church was an emotional moment.
"This is a man I had always wanted to see," she said. "It is just too bad it was only after his death."
In addition to Medvedev, many of Russia's noted political and cultural figures attended the funeral.
"He was our savior, the savior of our morals, our dignity, our consciousness," said Maxim Shostakovich, the son of composer Dmitry Shostakovich, who also suffered under Stalin's regime.
Solzhenitsyn, who lived in the United States for 20 years after being exiled from the Soviet Union in 1974, leaves a legacy as thorny and complicated as his defiant and strict personality.
He returned to Russia in 1994 and later estranged himself from liberal reformers when he embraced former President Vladimir Putin's campaign to restore centralized, topdown rule in Russia.
A devout Christian and Russian patriot, Solzhenitsyn supported Putin's efforts to restore Russia's pride and prestige.
After paying his respects to Solzhenitsyn's family at Tuesday's wake, Putin, now Russia's prime minister, instructed the nation's education minister to include Solzhenitsyn's work as a prominent part of school and university curricula.
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Correspondent Paul Sonne in Moscow contributed to this report
