by Olha Hembik | 2026-06-25

A 7 a.m. roll call. A short briefing. An order to dig, gather and hill the soil. Then lunch, then back to the field. This is the summer Russia is planning for its children as it moves to resurrect Soviet-style youth labor camps, where officials say young Russians will grow more virtuous through toil and pocket some cash on their school break.

Olga Yaroslavskaya, Moscow's commissioner for children's rights, proposed reviving the practice. She said the camps would keep young people busy over the summer and spare their parents the trouble.

The camps are a Soviet inheritance. Their stated goal was to prepare schoolchildren to choose a career thoughtfully and to work in the national economy. They grew out of the collective and state farms of the 1950s. Beginning in seventh grade, Soviet students spent several weeks working the fields for kopecks, or nothing, as a kind of summer internship. The arrangement handed the Soviet Union cheap labor for seasonal farm work.

Amending the law

Yaroslavskaya knows the routine firsthand.

"When I was in seventh grade we were taken to Volgograd Region to weed tomatoes in 40-degree heat in a barracks in the middle of the field," she said in an interview on the Govorit Moskva radio station. She believes children will welcome the idea. "We survived," she said, recalling the 120 RUB (about $1.50) she took home for the work.

Russian law now lets children take jobs at 14, but only with their parents' written consent. At 15, those who have finished a basic education can sign an employment contract on their own. The Russian Labor Code sets the age for free employment at 16. Workers under 18 cannot be hired for jobs with harmful or dangerous conditions, underground work, or roles in gambling, nightclubs or similar venues -- a guardrail the law frames as protecting young people's moral development.

Yaroslavskaya has gone further before, proposing to amend federal labor law and officially lower the working age to 12. For now, she is focused on the summer break. A law that took effect September 1, 2025, already allows teens ages 14 to 18 to work weekends during summer vacation, either through state employment-service referrals or on state-backed "student brigades."

Following the Soviet model

Economist Mikhail Belyaev calculated that children could earn up to 30,000 RUB (about $380) in the Soviet-type camps. He said they would not work full days.

"Based on the average wage of 60,000–80,000 rubles, they should be paid half. Otherwise, this makes no sense. Paying less will only be insulting to the children," Belyaev told the Absatz media outlet. The work, he said, would involve harvesting or weeding.

Critics counter that putting children in fields does nothing for national development.

Sergey Gataullin, a lead research scientist at the social modeling lab of the Central Economic Mathematical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, said real development means deploying advanced technologies and steadily raising labor productivity.

"The initiative by the children's ombudsman to revive youth labor camps based on the Soviet model will not stand up to any criticism in today's world," he said.

The claim that fieldwork helps young people choose careers bears no relation to reality, said Vitaliy Demchenko, a Kyiv-based independent political analyst. The war with Ukraine, he said, has drained Russia's workforce and pushed authorities to improvise.

"There are fewer and fewer young men, and if a mobilization is announced, there will be even fewer. In the face of an acute worker shortage, Russia is starting to promote child labor," he told Kontur.

The numbers back him up. Bloomberg reports that the war has triggered a crisis that will weigh on Russia's economy for years. The country is short 1.5 million workers -- roughly the population of Yekaterinburg or Novosibirsk. Research by FinExpertiza found the labor pool shrank by 3 million people in five years, falling from 7 million to 4 million. A demographic hole and the migration of workers into defense industries are among the causes.

Everything for the front

Russian children have been working since the start of the full-scale invasion, according to a large investigation by the outlet Verstka. For more than four years, schools have used child labor to supply the army. In technology classes, children sew gear, crests and bedding, weave camouflage netting and ghillie suits, cut insoles, and make trench candles and dry rations for the war effort. They produce 57 items of equipment for service members and stock hospitals, then post the results online. Investigators identified at least 1,017 schools across 77 Russian regions.

Serhii Kraivanovich, a journalist and Ukrainian serviceman, sees a wartime template.

"All of this is just like during World War II: children are being put to work under the slogan 'everything for the front, everything for victory,'" he told Kontur. He argued that Ukraine's own schools have failed to adapt.

"Russian schools are teaching kids how to solder drones and fly them. Ukrainian high school students are still making nest boxes. You get the feeling that they're threatening Russia, but they're not the aggressors. It's Ukraine that needs to survive," Kraivanovich said.

For others, the camps are about identity, not economics. Mykhailo Strelnikov, founder of the Museum of Victory over Despotism in Poland, said the goal is to rebuild the Soviet Union.

"It's not an economic issue," he told Kontur. The camps, he said, will lean more on reeducation than on labor. Exhausted teenagers stop thinking critically, he argued, and propaganda sinks in unchallenged.

"After performing grueling labor, adolescents aren't capable of critical thinking. The propaganda will fall firmly on the subcortex. Then later, there will be the Young Army and participation in a new war," Strelnikov said.