Recently (well, in comparison to Archipelag) published Anne Applebaum's Gulag is also a very good work, IMHO, but of course written from a different perspective and because of this "cooler" (emotionally). What she makes a point of is the senselessness of the whole enterprise, which except for mangling people's lifes, provided nothing.
Anyway she echoed my sentiments, whe she wrote that a thing which pushed her into work on the subject was the enormous tolerance for communism (in form of gadgets, for example) in the West. Bleh.

Not to be picky, but isn't the man usually spelled Solzhenitsyn?
V.