Synopsis
The First Circle (2006) is a Russian series adapted from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's novel, and you can watch online on iFILM. The year is 1949; inside the Marfino sharashka outside Moscow, imprisoned scientists build a secret telephone-scrambling device on Stalin's personal order.
Engineer Gleb Nerzhin faces a choice with no clean way out. Keep serving a regime he despises in exchange for a comfortable cell, or refuse and be shipped off to a real labor camp. A second thread follows diplomat Innokenty Volodin, an insider who risks a brief phone call to the U.S. embassy to warn of atomic espionage — and seals his own fate with it.
Gleb Panfilov directed the ten-part drama from a screenplay Solzhenitsyn reworked out of his own prose, and the author narrates it too. Dmitry Pevtsov, Evgeny Stychkin, Galina Tyunina and Andrey Smirnov play people who hold on to one terrible freedom even behind bars — the freedom to say no. It's the rare television series that talks about conscience more bluntly than most features. Stream The First Circle online on iFILM.
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