Like much of Solzenitsyn's work, the timescale of the novel is brief – a few weeks in the spring of 1955. This places the action after the death of Joseph Stalin and the fall of MVD chief Lavrenti Beria, but before Nikita Khrushchev's 1956 "secret speech" denouncing aspects of Stalinism, one of the heights of the post-Stalin "thaw" in the USSR. A purge of the Supreme Court and the fall of the senior Stalinist Georgy Malenkov take place during the time of the novel's action.