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I first watched One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich as a seventeen year old A-level History student. I had read Solzhenitsyn’s novella, borrowing my teacher’s Penguin paperback copy. Shortly afterwards BBC2 aired the movie. The family had recently acquired a new TV and video recorder from my dad’s redundancy money (this was early Thatcherism and this was the industrial north east of England), so I was able to save a copy on videocassette. Years later, as a university academic specializing in Russian history, I wanted to use movies as a historical source, to give students a visual insight into the knowledge normally acquired through the study of texts. For ‘authenticity’ my inclination was to draw upon Soviet movies through the usual suspects – The Battleship Potemkin (early Soviet period), The Cranes Are Flying (Khrushchev), Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears (Brezhnev), and Little Vera (Gorbachev). The exception was this favourite Western cinematic adaptation of a crucial text of Khrushchev’s de-Stalinisation. Despite the English and despite the non-Soviet setting, there is honesty to this dramatization that conveys authenticity. When videocassette was becoming technologically obsolete in the classroom, the university technicians transferred it to DVD. After a chance meeting in Glasgow and an accidental academic conversation about current teaching topics and methods, I lent my copy to colleague Andrei Rogachevskii to use in his own teaching. Subsequently he let it slip that he had gone on to co-author a book on filming the impossible, of which the current text is the second edition.

Why does One Day remain, for me, a crucial teaching tool? Why not just use the book? It does not make easy viewing, especially for a younger audience embedded in a culture of fast moving action and instant news. It challenges by its pace, by its silence, by the drama of non-drama. Rogachevskii and his co-author Ben Hellman note that for some critics this left them cold, without a sense of emotional involvement. Exactly – numbness, ambiguity, confusion are appropriate responses. Above all, I show One Day in class because this is a remarkable film that takes a text to a new level of visual art. It speaks directly to the audience as individuals and as a collective about that most difficult of questions: what was life like in the camps? From Tom Courtenay’s narration to the high quality acting in a brilliant and believable set, I defy anyone not to be moved by circumstances in which all, guards and prisoners, are entrapped by life in the camp. Through this movie we feel alternatively the boredom, the drabness, the friendship, the fear, the hope, and the taste of sausage or of tobacco. The editor of Novyi Mir, the Soviet journal that published One Day, praised Solzhenitsyn for encapsulating the contradictions of a complex time in the history of the USSR through well-rounded characters. In this One Day the film more than captures the spirit of One Day the book.

First, it establishes an individual point of view. This is history not as the result of class forces or organisations such as the Communist Party. It is the validity of first-hand experience that is incredibly difficult for us, ‘non-camp inmates’, to question. As Rogachevskii and Hellman point out, Solzhenitsyn felt that the camp was insufficiently realistic – clothes are too fine, prisoners are too well fed. The understandable ex-zek sensitivity will not be shared by most viewers for whom the stark conditions will be apparent.

Second, despite the prominence given to Ivan Denisovich, there is no dominant narrative as there are as many experiences of camp life as there are individuals. Each inmate lives Ivan’s day in his own fashion: one avoids the cells, another ends up in them; one enjoys a comfortable office job and conversations about art, another picks at ice in the open air to help lay the foundations of what will be the People’s Centre for Cultural Activities.

Third, it illustrates the complexity of a range of camp relationships, prisoner-prisoner, prisoner-guard, and guard-guard. There could be collaboration in breaking rules between prisoner and guard, for example, in order to make conditions a little more bearable – as when Ivan is let off punishment for getting up late so that a floor can be cleaned.

Fourth, despite the evidently horrible conditions (barrels as latrines, boiled grass as porridge, cramped sleeping arrangements, and a plethora of rules and regulations), this is a story about life. Death is largely absent; the imperative is to survive and to leave the camps. The arch survivor is Ivan Denisovich, able to take pleasure from building a wall to the extent that he works overtime, risking time in the cells to finish off the last of the cement. The Christian character Alyosha even raises a seemingly impossible consideration: why would one wish to leave the camps for the whirlwind of freedom when in the camps one is free to examine one’s soul? (Saul Bellow reaches a similar conclusion in A Dangling Man).

Fifth, the movie brings out the dilemmas of reform communism. Openness was required and encouraged to face up to the difficult recent Stalinist past. Stalin is linked to the camp system: it is his, not Lenin’s portrait that hangs in the officer’s rest room. That the lies and distortions of socialism Stalin style were an open secret is clear from a prisoner checking the thermometer to see if the temperature is so low that a non-work day would be declared, and a fellow inmate interjecting: ‘Do you think that they would hang one up that gives the real temperature?’ Such talk could produce the system’s downfall. When a supervisor asks Ivan Denisovich why he is laying cement so thinly he replies: ‘Because, citizen, if I lay it on any thicker when the spring comes the whole wall will collapse’. This is the victory of the small man over the bureaucracy. There are limits, though. It is precisely when a commissar’s communist honour is brought into public question during a morning search for ‘illegal garments’ that a harsh punishment is meted out: ‘Ten days in the cells (starting this evening)’. One could say so much more about this movie’s insights into life in a Stalinist camp and how the topic was tackled under Khrushchev. The point to stress is that One Day the movie is not just a historical relic from a Cold War cinematic past. It remains relevant as a celluloid pathway into that past.

Outwith a peculiar and particular Soviet experience, this movie speaks to individual actions and responsibility much more generally and universally. As Wrede himself noted: ‘we are what we do; that is not what we do but how we do it that makes us what we are’. Themes that here are presented in a historical camp context are also relevant in peaceful, ordinary, mainstream society, including the most affluent. One Day is not cheap Cold War rhetoric, for it has challenging and uncomfortable thoughts that transcend political divisions. The key question, repeated twice, is ‘how can we expect someone who is warm to understand someone who is cold?’ When this imaginative leap is taken, when true empathy rules, then one hopes that GULAG camps will not be constructed, that dialogue and charity will replace exclusion and violence in all guises, whether harsh or comparatively mild. This is the essence of a humanistic education. Ultimately and paradoxically, One Day also remains relevant as a hymn to humanism. We should all be grateful to Hellman and Rogachevskii for this fascinating insight into the making and reception of this remarkable filming of the unfilmable. If I were asked to recommend one movie about the camps, this would be it.

Ian D. Thatcher

Professor of History at the University of Ulster

Helsinki, November 2013