Reddit reviews In the First Circle

>Elite private education in America is on the cusp of this new era. The controversies over free speech, safe spaces, trigger warnings, microaggressions and the like are symptoms of this shift. . . Once the transition is complete, the “correct” side of the controversies will become central to a school’s identity. . .

This post from Instapundit earlier today just seems apropos: Prosperity breeds idiots

" At the start of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s novel In the First Circle, a Soviet diplomat on home leave in Moscow tries to make an anonymous call to the U.S. embassy. His purpose: warning the Americans of a Soviet theft of atomic secrets. But he gets a dull-witted, indifferent embassy staffer on the line, and the call goes nowhere. Or almost nowhere. The call is monitored by Soviet security. Arrested and imprisoned at the end of the novel, the diplomat’s final thought about Americans is that “prosperity breeds idiots.”

Solzhenitsyn’s diplomat channels views that were clearly held by the author himself. Comfort and safety, enjoyed too long in the West, invite complacency—and complacency leads to stupidity. As a gulag survivor, Solzhenitsyn had a barely disguised disgust for Western elites with little experience of political murder and repression. Nor could he abide the legion of fools who seemed fascinated, from a secure and prosperous distance, with socialist thought. "

There's a novel called 'In the First Circle' by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, which is set in a Soviet labour camp.

From one of the Amazon.com reviews:

>[...] In the sharashkas, the zeks (prisoners) are charged into developing a device that identifies voices recorded from tapped phone conversations...

More details on the book's Wikipedia entry:

>[...] The sharashka prisoners work on technical projects to assist state security agencies and generally pander to Stalin's increasing paranoia. While most are aware of how much better off they are than "regular" gulag prisoners (some of them having come from gulags themselves), some are also conscious of the overwhelming moral dilemma of working to aid a system that is the cause of so much suffering. As Lev Rubin is given the task of identifying the voice in the recorded phone call, he examines printed spectrographs of the voice and compares them with recordings of Volodin and five other suspects...

There have been at least three adaptations into film, including 'Den første kreds' in 1973, and the English language TV movie 'The First Circle'. The latter was originally broadcast in 1992.

EDIT:

Some clips from the TV movie here and here.

Here is a reasonably priced one, and if you care about "definitive" volumes it's the one to get.