The Gulag Archipelago is an account of the brutal arrests, imprisonment, and often murder of tens of millions of innocent Soviet citizens by their own government beginning under Vladimir Lenin in 1918 through the reign of Joseph Stalin to 1956. Solzhenitsyn saw his task as documenting for the Soviet people the full scope of what happened. He relies on his own experience in the Gulag from 1945 to 1953, along with experiences related to him by other survivors. It is a harrowing warning about the totalitarian nature of communist regimes.