MOSCOW — Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn, an author imprisoned and then forced into exile for his critical depictions of the Soviet Union, lay in a marble chamber in the heart of the capital Tuesday, guarded by Russian soldiers and mourned by thousands of his countrymen.
All day long, the onetime dissident lay waxy and white under bright layers of flowers in the Russian Academy of Sciences. His widow, children and grandchildren lingered at his side as grieving Russians braved a relentless rainstorm to say goodbye.
Many of the mourners were old and weary looking, pensioners who didn't have jobs to miss. They came shuffling out of the Metro and splashing through the puddles, clutching a few carnations or roses -- even numbers of stems, because in Russia the even numbers are traditionally reserved for death.
They came dragging their memories with them; it was hard to spot anybody who looked young enough to have been born after 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed.
"The sky is crying," said Yuri Agayev, a frail-looking man with thinning white hair, limping off into the wet afternoon. "God is crying."
It was a dark day, but Igor Andreyev wore his sunglasses. He'd taken the overnight train from St. Petersburg, where the retired librarian is member of the Solzhenitsyn Society. He suffered through internal Soviet exile, sent off to Sakhalin Island in the 1960s for being a member of a neo-Marxist organization, he said.
Andreyev walked through the marble hall, paid silent respects to the corpse and came out the opposite door, through the clusters of plainclothes security men muttering into their sleeves. Then he stood looking dazedly out into the day.
"It's nonsense. There were Duma deputies and FSB agents," he said, referring to members of parliament and to the post-Soviet successor agency of the KGB. "They have nationalist ideas, and yet they're here today."
Not for nothing, the security details. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin was on the way to place flowers on the coffin. The prime minister later appeared on state television and called for Solzhenitsyn's books to be given more emphasis in the Russian curriculum.
"With the entire nation, he lived through a tragedy of repressions," Putin said. "By his works and his entire life, he inoculated our society against tyranny in all its forms."
