August 4, 2008 By Citizen M

RA’s Daily Russia News Blast – Aug 4, 2008

040808.jpgTODAY: Alexander Solzhenitsyn, author of The Gulag Archipelago, dies in Moscow; Yabloko party criticizes psychiatric repressions; Nevzlin given life sentence; Russians increasingly opposed to single-party system; violence in South Ossetia kills 6; Yekaterinburg. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize-winning author of “The Gulag Archipelago,” which documented the horrors of Soviet labor camps, has died at age 89. Sergei Mitrokhin, leader of the Yabloko party, has spoken out against “the revival of psychiatric repressions in the country against people whose life philosophy is unacceptable to the authorities,” after an activist was put into psychiatric imprisonment for trying to prevent workers from cutting down a large group of trees. Former Yukos co-owner Leonid Nevzlin, having been charged on several counts of conspiracy to commit murder, has been sentenced to life in prison. Nevzlin’s responding statement, issued from Israel, said, “Just as in Stalin’s time, the goal of the Kremlin is to destroy its opponents by criminalizing them with false allegations.