One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

The Gulag, the Stalinist labour camps to which millions of Russians were condemned for political deviation, has become a household word in the West. This is due to the accounts of many witnesses, but most of all to the novel that first brought Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to public attention. His story of one typical days as experienced by prisoner Ivan Denisovich Shukov is sufficient to describe the entire world of the Soviet camps.