The message reads, in part:
"It has been a year since Mr Solzhenitsyn died, but the passage of time is making us increasingly aware of what an enormous and truly irreplaceable loss Russia's literature and culture, and Russia itself, has suffered.
"Alexander Solzhenitsyn was a remarkably versatile and gifted person, one with an encyclopaedic mind and a man with a strong spirit - a true Russian intellectual, a personality on a world scale. His ample creative and spiritual legacy will always hold a special place in the history of Russian literature and in the chronicles of our country."