Exiled Soviet dissident writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn gives a press conference in Paris 04 January 1975 at the "Editions du Seuil", his French publisher. Russian writer and dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn died overnight Sunday to Monday, the Itar-Tass news agency said, citing his son Stepan on August 3, 2008. He was 89. Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1970 after writing harrowing works about the Soviet Union's system of labour camps. He was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974. Since his return to Russia in 1994 he has been critical of the West and of Russia's post-Soviet evolution, calling for a return to traditional moral values. (AFP PHOTO)