6 Aug 2008 12:18:00 am

MOSCOW - MR ALEXANDER Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize-winning author whose books exposed and chronicled the vast network of Stalin's slave labour camps, has died of heart failure at age 89, his family said.
Recognisable in later life by his flowing beard and ascetic dress, Solzhenitsyn had been frail for several years. His son Stepan said on state television Vesti-24: 'He worked yesterday just like any other day. Then, in the evening, death came quickly.'

Solzhenitsyn's unflinching accounts of torment and survival in the former Soviet Union's gulags, or penal labour camps, had riveted his countrymen, whose sad, secret history he helped expose.

They earned him 20 years of bitter exile, but international renown.

He toiled obsessively to unearth the darkest secrets of Stalinist rule and his work ultimately dealt a crippling blow to the former Soviet Union's authority. He was eventually expelled in 1974 for his anti-Soviet views.

'He lived a difficult but happy life,' his widow Natalya told Interfax news agency.

Born in 1918, Solzhenitsyn served in World War II where, in the closing weeks of the war, he was arrested for writing what he called 'certain disrespectful remarks' about dictator Josef Stalin in a letter to a friend. He referred to Stalin as 'the man with the moustache'.

He was sentenced to eight years in labour camps that formed the basis for his first novel written in 1962. One Day In The Life Of Ivon Denisovich - his first novel - was the story of a carpenter struggling to survive in a Soviet labour camp.

The book was published by order of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, who was eager to discredit the abuses of Stalin, his predecessor. The book created a sensation in a country where unpleasant truths were spoken in whispers, if at all. Abroad, it was lauded for its bravery and its spare, unpretentious language.

His 1967 novel, Cancer Ward, was another fictional work based on his own life: during his years of internal exile from March 1953, the month of Stalin's death, until 1956. In the book, cancer became a metaphor for the fatal sickness of the Soviet system.

His Gulag Archipelago trilogy of the 1970s left readers shocked by the savagery of the Soviet state under Stalin. But his account of that secret system of prison camps was also inspiring in its description of how one person - Solzhenitsyn himself - survived, physically and spiritually, in a penal system of soul-crushing hardship and injustice.

After Khrushchev, Solzhenitsyn faced harassment by the Soviet secret police KGB, publication of his works was blocked and he was expelled from the Soviet Writers Union. But he was undeterred.

Hundreds of well-known intellectuals signed petitions against his silencing; the names of left-leaning figures like Jean-Paul Sartre carried particular weight with Moscow.

The West offered him shelter and accolades. But Solzhenitsyn's refusal to bend despite enormous pressure also gave him the courage to criticise Western culture for what he considered its weakness and decadence.

Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970, but he did not want to risk travelling to Stockholm, Sweden to accept the prize for fear that the Soviet authorities would prevent him from returning.

He was compared to the Russian greats - Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekhov.

In almost half a century, more than 30 million of his books have been sold worldwide and translated into some 40 languages.