August 6, 2008

# Range of Russian Mourners Pay Tribute to Solzhenitsyn

By MICHAEL SCHWIRTZ

MOSCOW — Scientists and clergy, dissidents and government officials — Russian and Soviet — came together Tuesday to bid farewell to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Russian literary master who died Sunday evening.

Mr. Solzhenitsyn’s prose sliced into the propaganda of the Soviet Union, helping to alter the consciousness of a whole generation. For this, many braved driving rains for a chance to pay their respects at the Russian Academy of Sciences, where his body lay.

“During perestroika, when ‘The Gulag Archipelago’ became accessible, it changed my world view,” Anatoly Anizov, a 52-year-old economist, said, referring to Mr. Solzhenitsyn’s monumental book about the Soviet prison system.

“After I read it, the history of the U.S.S.R. was cast in a new light,” he said, adding that he realized that “70 years of Soviet government was a mistake.”

Mr. Solzhenitsyn, who was 89 and died of heart failure, will be buried Wednesday at the Donskoy Monastery in Moscow after a service at the cathedral there.

Flanked by his wife, Natalia, and their sons and covered by flowers, Mr. Solzhenitsyn, a Nobel Prize winner, lay in an open coffin as mourners filed into a hall in the academy of sciences, some lingering to pray.

Though perhaps hundreds paid their respects throughout the day, including Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin and Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the former Soviet leader, little evidence of nationwide mourning has been seen. That suggests that the prominence of Mr. Solzhenitsyn, considered one of the greatest 20th-century writers, is waning in his native country.

Mr. Putin on Tuesday urged Russia’s education minister to include more of Mr. Solzhenitsyn’s works in school curriculums.

“He gave society a significant inoculation against tyranny in any of its guises,” Mr. Putin told the minister.

“I know there is a certain amount of his works in school curriculums,” he said, “but I do not think there is enough.”