Russia is now ripe for freedom revolution, warns Solzhenitsyn

THE former dissident author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has emerged from three years in obscurity with a warning that Russia could face a Ukrainian-style revolution.

The 86-year-old Nobel laureate, who spent ten years in the Soviet gulag, said in his first television interview since 2002 that Russia was not backsliding on democracy because it had never been truly democratic