Hear Hear !! Not only in the GULAG ARCHIPELAGO but also in ONE DAY IN THE LIFE OF IVAN DENISOVICH, CANCER WARD, FIRST CIRCLE, and his short stories, speeches, and other books, he wrote the truth. My favorite is CANCER WARD which on a larger level is more about the Soviet Union than it is about the cancer hospital and on a still deeper level is simply about life.
From Anne Applebaum's (circa 2003) GULAG: A History on page xxi,
" ... From the Russian Revolution on, official information about the Soviet camps was readily available too, to anyone who wanted it: the most famous Soviet account of one of the early camps, the White Sea Canal, was even published in English. Ignorance alone cannot explain why Western intellectuals chose to avoid the subject. ..." [my emphasis].