That’s pretty much what I expected

Aren’t penal colony and gulag interchangeable terms?

I’m sorry, is this somehow a revelation? “Direct heir” they say… There is a very good chance that “penal colony” is a former Gulag.

Somehow I don’t think modern Russian penal colonies are much like the gulag. Do workers make full wages for their work? Are they allowed to have their families live with them or earn 2 week trips out of the colony? Do they allow them to wear their civilian clothes? Can they send their money back to their families on the outside? Is 40% of the population turned over every year? I imagine they were referring to the mythological “gulag”, and not the real historical one we have actual physical evidence of, because that’s typically how it goes.