Russia’s hard labor shortage is so severe that the country is increasingly reliant on criminal hard labor for its affected industries to compensate for its hard labor shortage.
In 2022, Russia withdrew some 19. 1 billion rubles, or about $204 million, from forced hard labor in prisons, the Moscow Times recently reported, unearthing information from the Russian Finance Ministry. This exceeds estimates made by Russia last year, when budget makers planned to eliminate 15. 8 billion rubles of forced hard labor in prisons.
According to budget estimates for 2021, the country is expected to collect 15. 9 billion rubles in 2023 and 16. 2 billion rubles in 2024. According to August 2023 data from the Russian Federal Penitentiary Service, approximately 26,000 Russian prisoners are forced to paint in 1,700 organizations. That’s more than double what was reported in 2022, when 9,300 prisoners were forced to paint, according to the Jamestown Foundation research and analysis company.
Those trends have been sparked by a record workforce shortage in Russia, with around a million Russians having fled the country to avoid fighting or escape Russia’s difficult economic situation.
“The Russian economy is facing serious structural challenges, compounded by a lack of professional hard work,” Sergey Sukhankin, a senior research fellow at Jamestown, said last month. “The Kremlin has tried to integrate criminal hard work into certain sectors of the national economy to solve this problem. “
The use of prisoner labor is new in Russia. The practice dates back to the Soviet-era “Gulag” system, where prisoners were assigned to cadres in the riskiest and most “lucrative” sectors of the Soviet Union’s economy, Sukhankin explained.
Hard labor in prison may evolve toward a formula similar to that of the Soviet era, Sukhankin added, assuming the existing Russian leadership survives the standoff in Ukraine.
“The recent uptick in the use of forced prison labor in Russia is not merely the transient trend of a post-COVID, economically troubled, or war-hurt Russia. In the event that […] Vladimir Putin survives the war in Ukraine, the use of prison labor in Russia might evolve into a system similar to the Soviet period,” Sukhankin added.
Meanwhile, economists are issuing gloomy warnings about Russia’s long-term as the country continues to be battered by war and Western sanctions. Predictions are as dire as that Russia will become a failed state in the next 10 years, while sanctions are harsh and its reputation as a pariah state isolates it from global trade.
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