Soviet Union. Alexander Solzhenitsyn is arrested. Military censorship has intercepted his correspondence with his friend Koka, an officer on the Ukrainian front. He is sentenced to eight years in a concentration camp (GULag). In one of the concentration camps, he meets Koka. Released, he is immediately sentenced to perpetual confinement. In the GULag, he develops a tumor, which is removed and then metastasized. He survives, against all expectations. He is released by Khrushchev in 1956. In 1958, he conceives the beginning of the work that will become The Gulag Archipelago. In May 1968, he manages to have the microfilm of the book delivered to the West. Shortly thereafter, he also meets the physicist Andrei Sakharov, and Natalya Svetlova, a young mathematician who will become his second wife.
