EVGENIA GINZBURG, a Russian Literature Professor at the University of Kazan, and her family live the privileged lives of Communist apparatchiks, with a large apartment, a new American car and a country dacha. Under Stalin's leadership, the Communist Party undergoes a major transformation, and little by little, all intellectuals, engineers and academics are interrogated by the secret police. Evgenia is suspected of membership in a Trotskyist organization. While enduring various sophisticated psychological tortures, she finds herself facing outrageously trumped-up charges. Unwilling to denounce anyone, she is sentenced to 10 years of hard labor. For Evgenia, it is the beginning of a long, painful journey into the Gulag camp system, where she survives only because of her faith in poetry.