Solzhenitsyn constructed his highly detailed narrative from various sources including reports, interviews, statements, diaries, legal documents, and his own experience as a Gulag prisoner.

Solzhenitsyn begins with Vladimir Lenin's original decrees that were made shortly after the October Revolution; they established the legal and practical framework for a series of camps where political prisoners and ordinary criminals would be sentenced to forced labor.Note 2 The book describes and discusses the waves of purges and the assembling of show trials by Stalin through the 1930s in the context of the development of the greater Gulag system; Solzhenitsyn closely examines its purposive legal and bureaucratic development.

That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others' eyes.... That was how the agents of the Inquisition fortified their wills: by invoking Christianity; the conquerors of foreign lands, by extolling the grandeur of their Motherland; the colonizers, by civilization; the Nazis, by race; and the Jacobins (early and late), by equality, brotherhood, and the happiness of future generations...

[6] After the KGB had confiscated Solzhenitsyn's materials in Moscow, during 1965–1967, he worked to develop his preparatory drafts of The Gulag Archipelago into finished typescript.

While held at the KGB's Lubyanka Prison in 1945, Solzhenitsyn had befriended Arnold Susi, a lawyer and former Estonian Minister of Education, who had been taken captive after the Soviet Union occupied Estonia in 1944.

Solzhenitsyn entrusted Susi with the original typed and proofread manuscript of the finished work, after copies had been made of it both on paper and on microfilm.

News of the nature of the work immediately caused a stir, and translations into many other languages followed within the next few months, sometimes produced in a race against time.

Not only did it provoke energetic debate in the West; a mere six weeks after the work had left Parisian presses Solzhenitsyn himself was forced into exile.

Since he was under constant KGB surveillance, Solzhenitsyn worked on only parts of the manuscript at any one time, so as not to put the full book into jeopardy if he happened to be arrested.

"[20] Reshetovskaya created an abridged version for Russian high-school students,[16] including an introduction about the nature of Solzhenitsyn's "experiment in literary investigation.

"[21][22] Her books were published by the Novosti Press, a state-run media founded by the USSR Council of People's Commissars and the Communist Party Central Committee.

[26][27] Gabor Rittersporn shared Getty's criticism, saying that "he is inclined to give priority to vague reminiscences and hearsay ... [and] inevitably [leads] towards selective bias", adding that "one might dwell at length on the inaccuracies discernible in Solzhenitsyn’s work".

"[37] About its impact, philosopher Isaiah Berlin wrote: "Until the Gulag, the Communists and their allies had persuaded their followers that denunciations of the regime were largely bourgeois propaganda.

"[36] United States diplomat George F. Kennan said that the book was "the most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever to be levied in modern times.

"[38] Author Tom Butler-Bowdon has described the book as a "Solzhenitsyn's monument to the millions tortured and murdered in Soviet Russia between the Bolshevik Revolution and the 1950s.

[39] Psychologist Jordan Peterson, who wrote the foreword of an abridged fiftieth anniversary edition released on 1 November 2018,[40] described The Gulag Archipelago as the most important book of the twentieth century.

"[43] In December 2009, the Russian channel Rossiya K showed the French television documentary L'Histoire Secrète de l'Archipel du Goulag[44] made by Jean Crépu and Nicolas Miletitch,[45] and translated it into Russian under the title Taynaya Istoriya "Arkhipelaga GULAG" (Secret History: The Gulag Archipelago).