Solzhenitsyn has created this work from his own experience of imprisonment and forced labour and from that of numerous victims of Stalin's terror and of Soviet prisons and labour camps. The result is a unique and startling national epic that presents the suppressed history of a vicious epoch and clearly documents the system that deformed or destroyed the lives of millions.

In 1933 Betty Roland went to Moscow with her lover Guido Baracchi, a member of the Australian Communist Party. Roland broke all the rules and stayed for fifteen months, sharing a room with fellow Australian writer, Katharine Susannah Pritchard. Her diary details the excitement of her introduction to Russian theatre and her life in Moscow. She has a few priveleges which almost compensate for the bedbugs and the fierce Russian winter. As Roland smuggles literature through Nazi Germany or stands in endless queues at thirty below zero, she experiences the false dawn of Stalin's new revolution. When she leaves in 1934, Stalin closes the country to the West.