Soviet Union. Alexander Solzhenitsyn manages to smuggle the microfilm of the book The Gulag Archipelago to the West. Shortly thereafter, he also meets the physicist Andrei Sakharov and Natalya Svetlova, a young mathematician who will become his second wife. Solzhenitsyn was arrested in 1945, sentenced to eight years in a concentration camp (GULag), and then sentenced to perpetual confinement. In the Gulag, he develops a tumor, which is removed and then metastasized. He survives, against all odds. He is freed by Khrushchev in 1956. In 1958, he conceives the beginning of the work that will become The GuLag Archipelago.
