Throughout the 20th century, many countries were ruled by totalitarian leaders willing to commit many horrible acts to achieve their goals. Joseph Stalin, leader of the Soviet Union between 1924 and 1953, is the perfect example of a despotic leader responsible for the deaths of millions of people. He believed that communism would transform the Soviet Union into a perfect nation, with an ideal society where everyone would be treated equally. However, to achieve this perfection, all external and, more importantly, internal enemies had to be destroyed. Instead of a perfect nation, Stalin created a system based on fear and denunciation, in which killing so-called "enemies of the nation" became a sport, where Stalin's representatives competed on the basis of of the number of enemies. “enemies” killed. For nearly three decades, millions of innocent people were killed or sent to labor camps. The author of the book himself was sentenced to eight years in a concentration camp for his anti-Soviet views which he expressed in writing, and through the characters in his novel, Solzhenitsyn describes his personal beliefs. Most of the characters in “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” are innocent people who have never done anything reprehensible. Among them are Gopchik, a sixteen-year-old boy who was sentenced to 10 years in a concentration camp for giving milk to Ukrainian nationalist rebels, and Aleshka the Baptist who was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison for his beliefs religious. The novel's protagonist, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, is a simple man without any heroic qualities. He is a former carpenter sent to the battlefields during World War II. After being captured by the Germans, Ivan and five of his comrades were able to escape and return to the Soviet military base. However, three of them were killed instantly, mistaken for German soldiers, while the fourth soldier died of his wounds a few days later. Although Ivan Denisovich was not shot, he was arrested and accused of being a German spy. Even though he was innocent, he had to confess during interrogation, because he understood that if he didn't, he would be shot immediately. As a result, he was sentenced to ten years in a Siberian concentration camp for betraying the Soviet Union. Soviet labor camps represented a small-scale totalitarian nation, where guards were despotic rulers who frequently mistreated prisoners..