The central place in the narrative is occupied by the ideological dispute between the heroes of the novel. They all went through the war and the Gulag. However, one of them remained a convinced communist. Another, Nerzhin, is convinced of the depravity of the very foundation of the communist system. In the past, he himself was an ardent supporter of it, he experienced a complete collapse of his beliefs. The conscious moral choice of Gleb Nerzhin, who preferred the paradoxical freedom of the prison stage to the dubious happiness of the sharashka, is the leitmotif of the novel.’