There is a paragraph that mentions other countries having their own deportation systems. How much of "other countries bad" must be in an article about very particular Russian system?

Bingo. And these type of hn posts always bring out the bigots: I generally flag them unless tech related. Some people here can’t talk about any Russian/USSR topic with going full-blown Russophobia. There's other places for that like reddit, hn is not it.

Article is from 1980 and mentions the USSR in the present tense. Surveiller et Punir is from the late 1970s; that’s not exactly a long time for its influence to percolate into the pages of History Today in 1980. This is pretty much what I’d expect from an anglophone article about Siberian exile from the late years of the Cold War.

Just because an article focuses on one topic doesn't mean the subject is being singled out.