 A range of characters are depicted, including those who benefited from Stalinism, resisted or acquiesced.Like Solzhenitsyn, the main character, the Russian Oleg Kostoglotov, spent time in a labour camp as a "counter-revolutionary" before being exiled to Central Asia under Article 58.The story explores the moral responsibility of those implicated in Stalin's Great Purge (1936–1938), when millions were killed, sent to camps or exiled.