the latter, it's fiction. Solzhenitsyn was a fascist who supported the Nazis and Franco

check out this thread too

Gulag Archipelago? It’s a great read as a historical primary source, and as far as I know it’s not full of made up BS; being in a Stalinist Gulag really did suck ass.

Edit: also there are definitely moments where he’s trying to depict the horrors of the soviet prison system, and my reaction (even as a lib teenager reading the book) was “oh that sounds just like the US prison system.”