Professor Elvov

Professor Elvov is thirty-three, a fiery and prominent speaker in the Communist Party, and a Party-approved professor teaching at the Marxist Institute. He is friends and coworker with Eugenia Ginzburg. He is known for his loyalty to the Communists, and he contributes to a multivolume history of the Communist Party. But Joseph Stalin writes a letter to the newspapers declaring some of Elvov's writings to be false as well as Trotskyist in nature. Elvov is then arrested and taken away in the middle of the night. His arrest sets of a series off arrests in Ginzburg's town and region.

Eugenia Semyonovna Ginzburg

Eugenia Semyonovna Ginzburg is a wife and mother living in the province of Tartary in Communist Russia. She is a loyal Communist Party member and teacher. She is falsely accused of terrorism and is taken to Black Lake, transferred to Butyrki Prison, and then is...