Like One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1963), The First Circle takes place in a Siberian labor camp. This camp, Mavrino, is different: It is a sharashka (literally "a sinister place"), a special facility where inmates with engineering or scientific skills work on secret research projects.

Mavrino sits on the outskirts of Moscow. Its prisoners have the occasional chance to visit with family, and they work daily beside free employees. They interact with nearby government agencies overseeing the research. The novel juxtaposes prison society and Soviet society to more closely observe the authoritarian mentality that incarcerates innocent people. It studies the stress of enduring imprisonment, either the comfortable imprisonment of the sharashka's inhabitants or the invisible imprisonment of all Soviet citizens.