Putin joins mourners at Solzhenitsyn coffin

By James Kilner and Conor Sweeney

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Clutching a bunch of blood red roses, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin joined hundreds of elderly Russians on Tuesday laying flowers at the foot of Soviet dissident writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn's open coffin.

Solzhenitsyn, a Nobel laureate who won international fame by showing the world the horror of Soviet labor camps through his books, died of heart failure on Sunday aged 89.

Four Russian soldiers stood to attention at each corner of his coffin in the Russian Academy of Sciences, the hallmark of an official lying-in-state. A large portrait of Solzhenitsyn and a Russian flag completed the backdrop.

Outside the mammoth white building overlooking the River Moskva, a steady trickle of mainly elderly Russians shrugged off heavy rain to mourn their hero.

Solzhenitsyn's widow Natalia and his sons looked on as mourners brought small bouquets of white or red flowers to lay before his coffin.

"Solzhenitsyn was one of the most important people in the history of Russia; he wrote exactly what he thought and needed to be remembered," said maths professor Alexander Romanov, 60.

"It's a shame that not all young people understand how important he is."

At around 1 p.m. Putin, a former agent of the KGB security service that led the persecution campaign against Solzhenitsyn, strode into the hall flanked by burly security guards.

He laid flowers at the foot of the coffin, quickly looked at Solzhenitsyn's white, waxy face, crossed himself and turned towards the family.

Putin then spoke to Solzhenitsyn's widow for about five minutes before walking off.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev plans to attend the funeral on Wednesday.

Solzhenitsyn attracted international attention after the publication in 1962 of "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich", which chronicled the life of a labor camp prisoner.

CRITICAL OF MODERN RUSSIA

Josef Stalin's forced collectivization of farmers and purges in the 1930s, followed by fierce repression after World War Two, killed millions of people in the Soviet Union.

Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970 and later wrote "The Gulag Archipelago", a chronicle of his own and thousands of other prison camp experiences.