Chronicles the events of 1929 to 1933 in the Ukraine when Stalin's Soviet Communist Party killed or deported millions of peasants; abolished privately held land and forced the remaining peasantry into "collective" farms; and inflicted impossible grain quotas on the peasants that resulted in mass starvation.
Expanded by Solzhenitsyn to almost twice the length of the original edition, this novel reconstructs the assassination of tsarist Prime Minister Pyotr Stolupin and the outbreak of the First World War