WHEN Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s novel The First Circle was first published in the West in 1968, it helped to expose the brutality of the Soviet gulag system.

Twenty-two years later, its release in the Soviet Union pre-empted the fall of communism.

Now, more than half a century after he wrote it, the first Russian film of the novel has hit television screens, giving the Nobel prizewinner a new lease of life at the age of 87.

And the story is once again proving resonant after a crackdown on non-governmental organisations that activists liken to the Soviet Government’s treatment of dissidents.

Solzhenitsyn, who returned to Russia in 1994 after twenty years in exile, wrote the screenplay and provided the voiceover for the ten-part serialisation, which began on Sunday night. Gleb Panfilov, the director, told The Times that the author — who spent a decade in Soviet prison camps — had broken down in tears when he saw the first clips. “He was deeply moved and excited,” he said.

“His wife, Natalya, told me that was the first review for my film.”

The First Circle tells the story of a group of inmates in a sharashka, a prison camp where academics and technicians worked on secret state projects to avoid forced labour in harsher camps.

The novel, whose title is a reference to Dante’s Divine Comedy, was based on Solzhenitsyn’s experiences in a sharashka near Moscow after he was jailed for criticising Stalin in a private letter in 1945. By the end of the book, Gleb Nerzhin, his autobiographical hero, decides to stop co-operating with the State, even if that means death in a labour camp.

Panfilov said that Nerzhin’s moral dilemma was as relevant to post-Soviet Russia as it was in 1968. “It is the question of choice — whether to live with a clear conscience and to save your humanity. This is a problem in everyone’s life — not just in a camp or a prison,” he said.

He hoped that the film would teach young people about the horrors of the Stalin era, when millions of people were executed or sent to labour camps. “We live in free conditions now,” he said. “You can’t imagine what it was like back then. People were sent to Siberia and killed. It is impossible to compare it.”

But human rights activists hope that the film will also remind people of the dangers of allowing the Kremlin to accumulate too much power.

The film was launched three weeks after President Putin adopted legislation imposing new restrictions on non-governmental organisations in what some say is an attempt to silence critics.

Last week the Federal Security Service accused four British diplomats of spying and covertly funding NGOs, including the Moscow Helsinki Group. Lyudmila Alekseyeva, a former dissident who heads that group, said that the Kremlin was using the same smear tactics against its critics today as it did in Soviet times.

“I lived in the Soviet Union and I know how they organise these campaigns,” she said. “How can they look into their children’s eyes?”

Solzhenitsyn, who rarely speaks with the media, was not available for comment. But in a television interview last year he said: “It is often said that democracy is being taken away from us and that there is a threat to our democracy. What democracy is threatened? Power of the people? We don’t have it. We have nothing that resembles democracy.”

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