A statue of Soviet dissident and Nobel Prize laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn in Russia's far eastern city of Vladivostok was vandalized days after being erected this week.
A young man hung a sign on the statue bearing the word "Judas," in reference to the disciple who betrayed Jesus Christ, a video uploaded to Russian social media websites shows.
The man called Solzhenitsyn a "traitor, anti-Soviet and a Russophobe" in the video, and said the majority of the city's residents had favored a statue of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin over that of the author of "The Gulag Archipelago."
Solzhenitsyn visited Vladivostok in 1994 upon his return to Russia from two decades in exile in the West after being deprived of his Soviet citizenship and deported from his native country over his criticism of the Soviet system.
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