The population of Ivan's prison camp contains a cross section of Russian society. There are prisoners representing virtually every professional, social, and ethnic group in the Soviet Union: we find artists, intellectuals, criminals, peasants, former government officials, officers, Ukrainians, Latvians, Estonians, and gypsies (Caesar Markovich), just to name a few. If one looks, therefore, beyond the literal level of the novel, it becomes clear that Solzhenitsyn not only wanted to give a realistic description of life in a Siberian prison camp, but that he also wanted the reader to understand that the camp — on an allegorical level — was a representation of Stalinist Soviet Russia.
In an interview, Solzhenitsyn once stated that he had been interested in a statement made by Leo Tolstoy, who said that a novel could deal with either centuries of European history, or with one day in a man's life. (This statement by Tolstoy may have also been the reason why Solzhenitsyn changed the title of this work from S-854 to One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.) During his own prison term, the author made up his mind to describe one day of prison life, one day in the life of Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, whose fate Solzhenitsyn once called "the greatest tragedy in Russian drama."
Read on this level, the novel becomes a scathing indictment of the Soviet system during the Stalin era. Solzhenitsyn would now certainly extend this indictment to the Soviet system as a whole. There are chronic food shortages, except for a privileged few who can bribe advantages out of corrupt officials. There is vandalism and bureaucratic inefficiency, leading to waste and sabotage. To dispel any doubt that all this applies only to camp life, Solzhenitsyn introduces Ivan's thoughts about the collective farm from which he comes ('Daydreams of Home and of the Kolkhoz"), which is barely functioning. The men there have bribed the officials to relieve them from farm work so they can paint the profitable, sleazy carpets. In addition, there is also the constant spying and informing activities which are typical of Soviet society, and Solzhenitsyn deplores them most of all, for they create distrust among people who should cooperate against the authorities rather than against themselves. A prisoner, he says, is another prisoner's worst enemy, not the authorities. It is interesting to note that, in spite of serving ten- or twenty-five-year sentences, all of the prisoners seem to be serving life terms. Nobody is ever released from the larger Soviet prison; when one term ends, another one is added on.
