That's a great topic!

I know even less about it than you do; however, at this point I'm pretty good at figuring out how to come up with a paper topic. ;)

The best way to start is to read something! Find a book--the more recent the better--about gulags in the USSR, or the legacy of the gulag system. Read it. See what sparks your interest. Check the footnotes. Read those books and articles. If you find citations to or quotes from primary sources that are available in a language you read, definitely track those down.

Some shortcuts for a paper topic are:

• Find two scholars who disagree on a narrow issue and use outside evidence to determine which one is more likely correct
• Take a primary source and interpret it in its historical context--since you're interested in cultural signifance, portrayals of gulags or gulag-like institutions in Soviet science fiction, or in post-Soviet SF, might be examples I could think of offhand
• Trace the changing appeal/use of a well-known text on the topic (a memoir, perhaps?)
• Pick a particular case study (here, maybe an individual gulag?) and trace its appearance in various media

In any case, it starts with reading to find out what's out there!

Cool topic.

You have a lot of options. Two that sprung to mind immediately:

1. The gulag in Soviet literature. Solzhenitsyn, Ginzberg, etc. are widely available in English and could form a base of primary sources in translation.

2. Being exiled to siberia was hardly a Soviet invention, so you could do a paper on how the gulag in particular influenced/changed post-Stalin conceptions of siberia. This strikes me as a harder paper to write just based on source availability, but I like the topic more (maybe no coincidentally).

I don't really want to say too much more because this is your research to do and paper to write. Good luck.