After Russian officials bemoaned the collapse of migrant labor in the coronavirus pandemic, the head of the country’s prison service offered a solution: reviving the Soviet-era practice of putting convicts to work. Just don’t call it a gulag.

An association with one of the darkest chapters of the Communist past hasn’t deterred top bureaucrats, who’ve taken up the idea with enthusiasm. Deputy Prime Minister Marat Khusnullin recalled he once worked with prisoners at a brickmaking factory as he told an RBC news interviewer Friday that he’s in talks on using convicts at construction sites, a plan also endorsed by Industry Minister Denis Manturov.

"This won’t be a gulag, it will be completely new and decent conditions” for the prisoners involved, Alexander Kalashnikov, head of the Federal Penitentiary Service, told human rights officials last month, the state-run RIA Novosti news service reported. Nearly 190,000 of Russia’s 483,000 prisoners would be eligible, though participation should be voluntary, he said.