The First Circle — В круге первом

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Remarkable scenes from Solzhenitsyn's "The First Circle."

Watch from time marks

02:00 to 12:00:

Abakumov (minister of state security) is interviewing a prisoner who is working on an urgent high-tech issue of particular interest to Stalin. Abakumov has no trust in the officers reporting to him on the project, preferring to learn of its true prospects through horse's mouth.

20:20 to 32:34:

Abakumov reporting to Stalin.

34:30 to 37:10:

Having reported to Stalin, Abakumov is taking it out on the top brass responsible for the project.

The novel depicts the lives of the occupants of a sharashka (a research and development bureau made of gulag inmates) located in the Moscow suburbs. This novel is highly autobiographical. Many of the prisoners (zeks) are technicians or academics who have been arrested under Article 58 of the RSFSR Penal Code in Joseph Stalin's purges following the Second World War. Unlike inhabitants of other gulag labor camps, the sharashka zeks were adequately fed and enjoy good working conditions; however, if they found disfavor with the authorities, they could be instantly shipped to Siberia.

The title is an allusion to Dante's first circle of Hell in The Divine Comedy,[1] wherein the philosophers of Greece, and other non-Christians, live in a walled green garden. They are unable to enter Heaven, as they were born before Christ, but enjoy a small space of relative freedom in the heart of Hell.

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