Estimated read time: Less than a minute
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
MOSCOW, May 10, 2006 (AFP) - Russian writer and former Soviet dissident turned fierce Perestroika critic Alexander Zinoviev died aged 83 late Wednesday in Moscow of brain cancer, his wife Olga Zinovieva told AFP.
His body will lie in state at Moscow State University to give his admirers an opportunity to pay their last respects before he is buried on Monday, Zinovieva said.
Zinoviev, a former philosophy professor, spent over 20 years in exile, mostly in Germany, following the 1977 publication in the West of his master work, "The Yawning Heights," a devastating criticism of the Communist regime.
But the former dissident turned into a Communist supporter and a sharp critic of Mikhail Gorbachev's Perestroika following the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union.
Zinoviev finally returned to Russia in 1999.
dth/eh/shn
Russia-litterature-dissident
AFP 102021 GMT 05 06
COPYRIGHT 2006 Agence France-Presse. All rights reserved.
