MOSCOW — Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize-winning author whose books exposed the horrors of Soviet slave labor camps, was buried today in a Russian Orthodox ceremony that included goose-stepping honor guards and a religious choir singing solemn dirges.

Solzhenitsyn — who died Sunday at his home outside Moscow at age 89 from a chronic heart condition — was buried according to his will amid the pink brick cupolas of Moscow's Donskoi Monastery, where famous Russian cultural figures have been laid to rest since the 18th century.

The service, attended by Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and a bevy of white-robed Orthodox priest, had all the trappings of a state funeral, including the honor guards, a military band and a gun salute. Mourners, many of them older people bearing carnations and roses, flowed into the monastery's main church where Solzhenitsyn lay in an open casket.

A day earlier, thousands turned out in the rain to pay their last respects to Solzhenitsyn at a wake at the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Most of the mourners appeared old enough to remember the impact of Solzhenitsyn's early works, which revealed the existence of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin's Gulag, or prison camp system, when they were first published in the 1960s and 1970s.

For many younger Russians, Solzhenitsyn is a stern figure from an age gone by, a man whose legacy was as thorny and complicated as his personality.

Solzhenitsyn's nonfiction trilogy, "The Gulag Archipelago," published in the 1970s, shocked the Soviet elite, helped destroy lingering support for the Soviet experiment in the West and inspired a generation of dissidents inside the Soviet Union.

Solzhenitsyn also estranged himself from liberal reformers when he embraced former President Vladimir Putin's campaign to revive Soviet symbols and roll back the democratic reforms of the 1990s.

Putin, now Russia's prime minister, instructed the nation's education minister Tuesday to make sure that Solzhenitsyn's works make a prominent part of schools and university curricula.