On Sunday at 9 p.m., Rossia television will air the first episode of "The First Circle," a 10-part miniseries based on the novel by Nobel Prize-winning author Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

The partly autobiographical book is set in the late 1940s, near the end of the Stalin era. It takes place in a sharashka, an improvised research institute staffed with political prisoners. In those days, it was easy for the Soviet state to get free high-tech research, since huge numbers of scientists had been arrested. The plot centers around the quest to identify a distorted, low-quality recording of the voice of a would-be defector to the United States. It covers three days in the life of the sharashka and its inhabitants, including Gleb Nerzhin, the author's alter ego.

After the explosive success of "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," which saw the light of day in 1962 thanks to Khrushchev's Thaw, Solzhenitsyn tried to publish the novel, even trimming it to appease the censors, but to no avail. In the late 1960s, he restored the original plot and rewrote some parts.

Rossia, which had a major hit with its recent adaptation of Mikhail Bulgakov's "The Master and Margarita," seems to be aiming for a similar coup with "The First Circle." Director Gleb Panfilov is among the most respected members of the "old school" of Soviet cinema, while Yevgeny Mironov, who plays Nerzhin, is thought by many to be the best actor of the younger generation. The rest of the cast is equally impressive. But perhaps most significantly, Solzhenitsyn himself wrote the script and narrated parts of the voiceover. At a recent news conference, his wife, Natalya, said that the film was an important event in the life of the 87-year-old author.

Regardless of Solzhenitsyn's controversial views -- liberals often accuse him of nationalism -- the airing of a gulag-themed movie on national television is an important and timely gesture. The generation that witnessed the horrors of the Stalin era has mostly gone silent; younger viewers did not witness the perestroika-era revelations of Stalinist atrocities; the "cult of personality" and the inhuman nature of the Soviet regime have become myths. With the traditions of glorifying Russia's rulers and imprisoning political opponents (real or imagined) seemingly on the comeback, now is a good time to be reminded what such things eventually lead to. Especially keeping in mind that the cruel world depicted in both the book and the film is just the first circle, a spa resort compared with Ivan Denisovich's hell.