First, it's not clear to me how one could read this as having "proved that the gulags were not that bad." It is a very sterile, high-level account of Gulag administration from 1957. It does not in the slightest portray things from the position of the prisoners within the Gulag. I suppose if one believes that the Gulags were just extermination camps — an erroneously belief that is common in the West — you could see this orderly document as opposing that, but otherwise it is not the case.

It is important to note that almost all of the information in this document comes from after 1953. The "horror stories" of the Gulag are from the Stalin period, prior to 1953. There were large reforms in the Gulag in 1952-1953, as the document indicates, that altered its dynamics quite a bit. It didn't make it a nice place to be. But the really awful Gulag tales, such as working prisoners to death in order to accomplish Stalin's quotas, or the abuses caused by letting criminal prisoners run roughshod over the "political" prisoners, or the camps filled with children... those are from the earlier periods, during the Great Terror and in the immediate aftermath of World War II.

There is nothing in here about cold-caused mortality, about injury, about executions, about torture — many of the main Gulag abuses. There are slight nods to this in the reforms mentioned; e.g., by removing a "bounty" paid to guards who stopped escape attempts in 1952, it cut down on the number of guards shooting prisoners and claiming they had foiled an escape attempt.

Separately, in terms of what is "proved," it is important to note that a) the source of the information is totally unclear, and that matters for evaluating it (and we also do not know what its purpose was — it is mostly preoccupied with administrative matters, which might be a clue as to its origins and purpose), and b) this is only talking about a couple of specific camps in a specific region (which may not be representative). The Gulag was large and the variety between sites could be extreme, from the relatively post Gulags for engineers (sharashka) near Moscow, to the deadly uranium mines of Kolyma.

Anyway, much of what the document says seems plausible and believable to me as expressions of policy and some accounts of the post-Beria, post-Stalin situation. But that is only a small portion of the overall story of the Gulag, and certainly does not prove that they were "not that bad." That being said, there are of course exaggerated views of the Gulag in the west that go far beyond what they actually were, so it is always easy to claim they were "not as bad as some people think."

The Gulag was a massive prison system dedicated both to the extraction of labor value from its inmates, as well as having some ideological beliefs about the reformability of certain political classes. It was not an extermination system like the Nazis built, but the lives of political prisoners were considered pretty cheap, and the conditions of many of the camps were exceedingly harsh. As a result it had a very high mortality rate, and abuses by both guards and other inmates — murder, rape, torture — were quite common, if survivors' accounts, and the accounts of former guards and employees, are to be believed.

If you are interested in a more even account of how they actually were, and not just how they were relative to the alleged perceptions of others, you cannot rely on a single document. A very readable account is Applebaum's Gulag: A History. If you want a very, very vivid look at the abuses of the Gulag, check out Danzig Baldaev's Drawings from the Gulag. Baldaev was a Gulag guard from the 1940s until the 1980s, and drew some of the "scenes" that he witnessed. Many of them are no doubt exceptional and not part of the standard day-to-day activities of the Gulag (like two of the criminal prisoners cutting another in half with a saw, if I recall because he stole from them), but they add a level of "color" to otherwise dry accounts.

If someone on the Internet claimed that this document proved the Gulags were not that bad, they are just demonstrating their own ignorance.