MOSCOW - Vasily Aksyonov, a Russian writer and one of the last dissidents to be exiled from the Soviet Union, died Monday. He was 76.

Aksyonov, who suffered a stroke last year, died at a Moscow hospital, his widow Maya told Ekho Mosvky radio.

Aksyonov wrote more than 20 novels during a career that included his forced exile from the Soviet Union in 1980 after he was branded as "anti-Soviet." His most famous prose works were "The Burn," "The Island of Crimea" and "The Moscow Saga," known in English as "Generations of Winter."

Aksyonov lived in the United States for more than two decades, teaching at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, and working for Radio Liberty as journalist.

At 16, Aksyonov joined his mother in exile in the far eastern Magadan region.

Aksyonov graduated from the Leningrad Medical University in 1956 and worked as a doctor until switching full-time to writing in 1960.

He became one of the informal leaders of the so-called Shestidesyatniki - which translates roughly as "the '60s generation" - young Soviets who resisted the Communist Party's cultural and ideological restrictions.

About 5 million copies of his books were published in the Soviet Union until he fell out of official favor in the mid-1970s. In 1979, Aksyonov and several other young writers set up their own journal called Metropol, but it was blocked from publishing and Aksyonov was expelled from the official Union of Soviet Writers.

Aksyonov was reinstated as a Soviet citizen in 1990.