Alexandre Fenelon ---------------------------- Actually, the Gulag still exists. It is called the State Department for Implementing Punishments and Correctional and Labor Facilities, i.e., it is the prison system. You just don't get sent there for political reasons (legally; I'm sure it happens, though). Russia has forced labor camps. It also has the world's second-highest per capita incarceration rate (after the good ol' US of A).
Political imprisonments continued I think all the way through Gorbachev, though on a greatly reduced scale. Khrushchev let something like a million people out of the Gulag. I think it was Solzhenitsyn who said that, under Stain, it was a mighty river, and under Brezhnev a little rivulet. They of course continued to send criminals to them, "criminals" here including pornographers (who got three years) and homosexuals (though people I know who lived in the Brezhnev era say that to get sent to prison for being gay you had to be really, really ostentatious).
Chris Doss The Russia Journal