By Murad Rakhimov | 2025-08-26

Russia is reviving an old punishment with a modern twist: forced labor.

President Vladimir Putin on July 23 signed a law that allows courts to sentence convicts to work in correctional facilities instead of serving time in prison. The measure applies to those guilty of minor and medium crimes, as well as first-time offenders convicted of serious offenses.

The maximum term is five years. Wages earned by convicts will be docked between 5% and 20% and transferred to the state. Certain groups are exempt, including minors, people with disabilities, pregnant women, military personnel, individuals nearing retirement age and single fathers with children younger than 3.

Those who shirk duties or repeatedly violate work rules risk having their punishment converted to imprisonment.

Under the amended Criminal Code, forced labor is now an alternative to prison or fines for a range of offenses: failing to pay alimony, illegal banking, poaching, corruption in government contracts and commercial bribery.

Labor shortage

Russia introduced the measure amid a labor shortage worsened by the mobilization of men for the war in Ukraine.

At a May meeting with Delovaya Rossiya, a national association of entrepreneurs and business owners, President Putin said 50,000 to 60,000 men volunteer each month for the so-called "special military operation."

In July, Labor Minister Anton Kotyakov noted that Russia's economy will need at least 2.4 million additional workers by 2030, with the total labor shortfall projected to reach 10.9 million.

Alisher Ilkhamov, a London-based political scientist, said forced labor violates international law, including the 1957 Abolition of Forced Labor Convention, and is banned by Russia's own constitution.

"To a certain extent, the reintroduction of this punishment to the criminal system revives elements of slavery, as well as the katorga [penal] labor system used in the Russian Empire and under the [Joseph] Stalin regime," he told Kontur.

Return of Soviet practices

After Stalin's death, the Soviet Union used the "corrective work" penitentiary system, where inmates worked outside prison walls. Prisoners often preferred it to incarceration, but Ilkhamov noted it exposed them to hazardous industries and was exploited to fuel major economic projects.

"The return of forced labor as a criminal punishment effectively revives the practices of penal servitude and slavery," he said.

Ilkhamov stressed that the revival of forced labor is driven by economics, not humanitarian concerns. With resources stretched by the war and a deepening labor shortage, authorities hope to cut prison costs while filling jobs.

Scaling up forced labor "will inevitably cause justice to become more punitive," as commercial interests join political motives in the judicial system, Ilkhamov warned.

Russia first added a provision for forced labor in 2011 but delayed implementation to avoid Western criticism over human rights, he noted. That restraint has now vanished.

Violations of law

Dmitry Dubrovsky, a faculty member at Charles University in Prague, concurred that the move is economically driven and expands state repression rather than making punishment more humane.

He argued that penal labor violates the 2014 Protocol to the Forced Labor Convention because it can be applied to people convicted on political charges such as "justifying terrorism," "extremist slogans" or "calls to extremism."

"People convicted under these articles are considered political prisoners, and sending them to perform forced labor is considered a violation of the 2014 Protocol," Dubrovsky told Kontur.

Dubrovsky added that the Russian army already exploits forced labor, with commanders using soldiers for personal projects. With little or no public oversight of the prison system, inmates are left especially vulnerable to abuses of their labor rights.

In the military, he warned, assigning labor without trial violates international humanitarian law, including the Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions, and could amount to cruel treatment or even crimes under the International Criminal Court.

"The country has no legal mechanisms that can protect Russian service members from such practices," he said, adding that accountability would require a full investigation into war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by the Russian army.

Valentina Chupik, a human rights activist and labor migration expert, said the return of forced labor is tied less to mobilization than to ideology. She argued the government is restricting migration and trying to replace foreign workers with convicts, but predicted it will fail because "Russians have neither the qualifications, nor the diligence, nor the discipline. Especially Russian criminals."

Chupik linked the policy to the war and a push for social isolation.

"The country is being turned into a gulag, and slave labor is unavoidable," she told Kontur, noting that forced labor has deep roots in Russian history.