ABSTRACT
In a lecture delivered at Yale, Hannah Arendt maintained that The First Circle ought to be required reading for students of totalitarianism. The First Circle encompasses a broad swathe of Soviet society. Solzhenitsyn's prisoners at Mavrino suffer the bitter irony of being forced to entrap others, although some of those assigned to this task suffer from residual party loyalty. The principal characters among the prisoners at Mavrino are Gleb Nerzhin, Lev Rubin and slightly to one side Dmitri Sologdin. For Solzhenitsyn a good man is invariably one who takes a step-brave, defiant, principled-beyond mere interior opposition to the regime. Leading characters in The First Circle experience moments of critical decision: Nerzhin will not collaborate in technical work designed to benefit Stalin; the prisoner Bobynin defiantly refuses to help Minister of State Abakumov speed up work on the scrambler for Stalin's telephone.
