Saw this trailer for season 4 of Stranger Things (mild spoiler if you haven't seen season 3): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oB2GYwbIAlM
It depicts prisoners being forced to build a railroad in the cold Siberian winter under the watchful eye Kalashnikov-carrying soldiers, a good old-fashioned gulag. This scene would take place in about 1986.
I had always thought of the gulag system of forced labor was a feature of the Stalinist regime and was more or less gone by the '60s. Was it still around through the late '80s when this story takes place, or through the end of the USSR, or to modern Russia?
If so, who would we expect to be in a forced labor camp like this in this period? Fallen ex-party members? People who spoke too freely? Just a bunch of folks we might still consider criminals under a less oppressive regime?
'Gulags' (Glavnoe upravlenie lagerej) were formally closed in 1960, and starting in 1953 there were significant reductions in their population. It's worth noting that there were different classes of prisoners - 'politicals' and 'criminals'. The criminal element was generally antithetical to the political prisoners, and combining these groups helped suppress major rebellions. When you think of someone like Solzhenitsyn, he's writing about the political prisoners, but the majority of the population would have been criminals.
In 1953 criminal prisoners and political prisoners with brief sentences were released; this resulted in revolts against the guards by the political prisoners left behind, most violently the Kengir uprising of 1954. Kengir was partially precipitated by the re-injection of criminals in order to suppress and frustrate the political prisoners. (As an aside, recent arguments hold that long sentences were uncommon, while recidivism of the criminal class was.) But it shows that the Gulag system was already on the way out.
However, forced labor persists even after the formal dissolution of the Gulag. Perm-36, or ITK-36, is one of the more famous camps, and it operated until the late 1980s, and many 'Gulags' were converted to penitentiaries, such as Dubravlag. These sorts of penitentiaries, penal colonies (ispravitelnaya koloniya), still exist today in Russia. Article 70 of the 1960 Criminal Code preserved 'Anti-Soviet Agitation' as a crime punishable by up to seven years, and similar political crimes are sentenced now. So it's not implausible that you would have a remote prisoner's colony in the 1980s. Another question, however, is railroad construction. The Gulag system of productive labor was variably effective (the Belomor-Baltic canal is probably one of the more absurd moments of the 1930s USSR), but in general it wasn't a productive enterprise but a punitive one. By the 1980s the process you see in the video would have been mechanized, and most labor wouldn't have been large-scale works projects but rather small, contained efforts (sewing, brick making), though for dramatic flair it provides a nice setting.