Commentary .
Ivan Denisovich Shukhov wakes up to the same setting he has woken up to for several years. As one of millions of prisoners in the Siberian labor camps, he is forced to endure sub-zero temperatures and a lack of food on a daily basis. He is not a unique or heroic figure; he is not the sole innocent prisoner in a camp crowded with criminals. All of the squad members are victims of the Stalinist system, sent to labor camps for allegedly exposing Soviet military secrets to the German government. The only thing distinguishing Shukhov from the other prisoners is his habit of waking up early. Much of the novel's popular success in the Soviet Union was connected to the fact that the novel was widely recognized as a chronicle of common experience. At the time of the novel's publication, every Soviet citizen had some connection to the camps, whether through personal experience or the suffering of a friend or loved one. No one escaped the brutality of the Stalinist era, and Solzhenitsyn's attempt to document a day in the life of one prisoner was accepted as a realistic rendering of many other days in the lives of many other people.
Already, early on in the book, the characters have been reduced to numbers and parts of greater numbers: Ivan Denisovich is addressed by the number on his shirt-tag, and he identifies himself and the other prisoners by the numbers of their regiments. The narrative begins with a statement of the time of day, and the characters are obsessed with the freezing temperatures outside. Pavlo brings a bread ration that is one loaf short. Numbers play an important part in the camp lifestyle, as the prisoners learn to divide their time into years and months and days and hours. They are already divided up into groups and labeled accordingly; the drama that plays itself out in the novel is one of division and subtraction, doling out food and passing interminable lengths of time.