In an Interview with German weekly Die Zeit British historian Orlando Figes claims that many Gulag inmates he interviewed for his research identified so strongly with the book's contents that they became unable to distinguish between their own experiences and what they read. Thus, he claims "The Gulag Archipelago spoke for a whole nation was the voice of all those who suffered".

Though the scope of the text ends in 1956, the last prisoners sentenced according to the political paragraphs of the criminal code were quietly released in 1989. The exact number of Soviet citizens who went through the camp system will never be known, especially as key documentation was deliberately destroyed as the USSR was collapsing. Figures apparently compiled by the Gulag administration itself, and released by Soviet historians in 1989, show that a total of 10 million people were sent to the camps in the period from 1934 to 1947. The true figures remain unknown. Western estimates of the total number of deaths in the Gulag in the period from 1918 to 1956 range from 15 to 30 million.

One of the surprising and noteworthy elements is the powerful humor Solzhenitsyn employs throughout the text.[citation needed] It is one of the reasons the book has remained so popular. Rather than a grim rendering of crimes and atrocities, The Gulag Archipelago often contains sarcastic and ironic gallows humour. Precisely because of this dark humour, the prose often turns human and profoundly moving without ever falling into sentimentality or self-pity.[citation needed]

The work is also a powerful testament to Solzhenitsyn's multi-layered, rhythmic and precise prose art. In interviews he has often stated his wish to use all the resources of the language, old and new, proverbs, prison slang, legal style and poetic images; this variety is masterfully used in The Gulag Archipelago, and carries over even in translation.[citation needed]

After the KGB had confiscated Solzhenitsyn's materials in Moscow, during 1965-1967, the preparatory drafts of The Gulag Archipelago were turned into finished typescript in hiding at his friends' homes in Estonia. While in the KGB Lubyanka Prison, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had befriended Arnold Susi, a lawyer and former Estonian Minister of Education. After completion, Solzhenitsyn's original handwritten script was kept hidden from KGB in Estonia by Arnold Susi's daughter, Heli Susi, until the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The KGB seized one of only three extant copies of the text still on Soviet soil. This was achieved by torturing dissident Elizaveta Voronyanskaya, Solzhenitsyn's typist who knew where the typed copy was hidden; within days of her release by the KGB, she hanged herself on 3 August 1973.

Translated into English by American Thomas Whitney, the English and French translations of Volume I appeared in the spring and summer of 1974. Solzhenitsyn had been in touch with them about the upcoming publication, which he knew he could not put off much longer, but the final decision was taken by the YMCA Press itself with the author's implicit approval (two years previously, it had published August 1914).

Solzhenitsyn had wanted the manuscript to be published in Russia first, but knew this was impossible under conditions then extant. The international impact of the work was profound. Not only did it provoke a very vivid debate in the West, a mere six weeks after the work had left Parisian presses Solzhenitsyn himself was forced into exile.

Because possession of the manuscript incurred the risk of a long prison sentence for 'anti-Soviet activities', Solzhenitsyn never worked on the manuscript in complete form. Due to the KGB's constant surveillance of him, Solzhenitsyn only worked on parts of the manuscript at any one time, so as not to put the book as a whole into jeopardy if he happened to be arrested. For this reason, he secreted the various parts of the work throughout Moscow and the surrounding suburbs, in the care of trusted friends, and sometimes purportedly visiting them on social calls, but actually working on the manuscript in their homes. During much of this time, Solzhenitsyn lived at the dacha of the world-famous cellist Rostropovich, and due to the reputation and standing of the musician, even with Soviet authorities, he was reasonably safe from KGB searches there.