Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who exposed Stalin's prison system in his novels and spent 20 years in exile, has died near Moscow at the age of 89. Reports vary as to the cause of death of the ill Solzhenitsyn, citing either stroke or a heart attack.

The writer, author of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The Gulag Archipelago, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970 and was exiled from Russia in 1974.

Solzhenitsyn, who was accused in the past of being anti-Semitic, has been widely criticized for placing significant responsibility on Russian Jews for their role in the Communist Revolution in his last work, Two Hundred Years Together.