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Suspect in desecration of Solzhenitsyn mother's grave detained

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PYATIGORSK, January 31 (RIA Novosti) - Police Wednesday detained a man suspected of desecrating the grave of the mother of Russian Nobel Prize-winning writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn earlier this month in the south of the country.

The monument on the grave of Taisiya Solzhenitsyna was smashed January 17 in the Stavropol Territory's city of Georgievsk.

"The motive for the crime has not yet been established, but apparently it was an act of hooliganism," the local police said, adding that the detained 26-year-old suspect was currently being interrogated.

Taisiya Solzhenitsyna died of tuberculosis at the age of 49 on January 17, 1944, two weeks after her brother's death, and was buried alongside him.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, 88, a Soviet-era dissident writer whose work exposed the horrors of the Stalinist labor camps, was imprisoned, stripped of his citizenship, and expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974 following the publication of his seminal work The Gulag Archipelago.

He returned to Russia in 1994 after 20 years of exile in the United States only to find his mother's grave gone.

It was re-discovered in the spring of 2006 at the Georgievsk cemetery, where the St. George's Church is currently being built with sponsorship from Solzhenitsyn, among others.

Solzhenitsyn had to pay a heavy price for his opposition to the regime. The writer was imprisoned by Stalin for eight years for a frontline letter he wrote to a friend critical of the Soviet leader, but later enjoyed acclaim with the publication of his first book, A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, under a cultural thaw initiated by Stalin's successor, Nikita Khrushchev.

Mikhail Gorbachev restored Solzhenitsyn's citizenship in 1990 and later dropped treason charges against him.

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