{"id":199,"date":"2023-01-30T17:44:16","date_gmt":"2023-01-30T14:44:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/agentura.ru\/en\/?p=199"},"modified":"2023-03-14T17:49:22","modified_gmt":"2023-03-14T14:49:22","slug":"russias-return-to-gulag-economics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/agentura.ru\/en\/new-nobility\/russias-return-to-gulag-economics\/","title":{"rendered":"Russia\u2019s Return to Gulag Economics"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Andrei Soldatov, Irina Borogan<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Under the growing pressures of war, the Russian military-industrial complex is experiencing acute shortages in manpower. With so many workers mobilized and with casualties rising (now estimated to be \u201csignificantly, well over\u201d<\/a> 100,000), the authorities are beginning to look at another, time-honored source of cheap labor \u2014 the prison population. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Convicts have rarely been so sought after in Russia, at least since Stalin\u2019s time. The notorious Wagner mercenary group, a Kremlin-authorized private army, has already been recruiting convicted criminals<\/a> with the offer of get-out-of-jail-free cards for those able to survive six months on the Ukrainian frontlines. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Those dubious about Wagner\u2019s deal will now be steered towards the manufacture of tanks and other weaponry.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Russian demand for industrial workers has increased dramatically since the war in Ukraine started, and there is apparently no other way to satisfy it.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s hardly a secret that the country has been experiencing a shortage of locksmiths, welders, and turners for a very long time. And now Russia just doesn\u2019t have enough workers to manufacture missiles and tanks for Putin\u2019s war in Ukraine. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Uralvagonzavod, the largest tank manufacturer in the country, failed to hire enough workers, even the unskilled, and has no choice but to use convicts to fill the gap. Hundreds of prisoners from a penal colony in the Sverdlovsk region will soon be sent to Uralvagonzavod.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to the\u202f Russian\u202fgovernment, the shortage of workers\u202fin\u202fthe military-industrial complex will soon reach 400,000 people, including 120,000 professionals with higher education.\u202f\u202fGiven that the industry employs two million workers and engineers, this is a very significant number. To begin with, factories tried to make up for shortages by poaching personnel from private industry \u2014 after mobilization, military industries could offer protection against the call-up \u2014 and from the retired. The leading manufacturer of armored personnel carriers, the Kurgan factory, even promised to provide housing and guarantee the employment of family members.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But it didn\u2019t solve the problem: in September alone, the month of mobilization, manpower shortages in the military sector increased by 7%. Thus the need for convicts.\u00a0\u00a0
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The tradition of using prison labor to satisfy the\u202f state\u2019s needs originated in Stalin\u2019s times, when millions of prisoners in\u202fGulag\u202flabor camps,\u202fnotorious for inhuman conditions,\u202fwere\u202fmercilessly\u202fexploited to build roads\u202fand factories,\u202fdig channels\u202fand extract minerals. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Kremlin is not embarrassed by this loud historical echo. Even before the war, in\u202f2021,\u202fthe government\u202f supported a\u202fplan\u202fdeveloped by\u202fthe Russian railway behemoth RZD\u202falong with\u202fthe prison service to use convicts to\u202fbuild\u202fa new section of the Baikal-Amur Mainline track (BAM) in Siberia, a railway running from Lake Baikal in eastern Siberia to the Sea of Japan in the Far East.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Launched by Stalin in the 1930s,\u202fthat\u202fproject\u202f claimed the lives of tens of thousands of Gulag prisoners,\u202fbut the Kremlin\u202f accepted the idea of\u202fusing free prison labor.\u202fThe war has simply provided a justification to return to the old methods.   <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since Putin\u2019s plan to win a short military war in Ukraine has visibly failed, Russia\u202fis\u202fgetting \u202fready to wage a long and devastating war in Ukraine. To do so, it must adjust the economy to the new conditions and increase weapons production. Many military plants and manufacturers have been working around the clock for months now, but still cannot satisfy the growing demand without new supplies of workers. Russia\u2019s prison population of 450,000 provides a potentially large number of unskilled workers.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the Stalinist labor tradition was equally ruthless toward scientists and the highly skilled. When his security services needed to conduct secret research, they\u202fjust\u202farrested scientists and engineers and sent them to special installations, the sharashkas<\/em>, which were closed off from the outside and heavily guarded. The motivation was provided through threats that scientists and engineers filing to provide quick results would be sent to the (even worse) labor camps. Alexander Solzhenitsyn was the most famous guest of one such facility, a sharashka<\/em> in Marfino, east of Moscow. The facility still exists and is now one of the most successful Russian surveillance research centers, a world leader in biometric recognition technologies which identify a speaker by his or her voice on the phone.\u202f <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some members of the State Duma, including a vice-speaker, Boris Chernyshov, had voiced the idea \u201cof resurrecting mobilization-type design bureaus\u201d as early as October. \u201cWe together \u2014 scientists, government, military \u2014 must return the good old Soviet traditions. Scientists will be called upon to solve not only military but also state problems,\u201d Chernyshov said. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Putin\u2019s Russia, never deterred by comparisons to the country\u2019s bloody Soviet past, gives every indication that it will rummage still deeper into Stalin\u2019s repressive toolkit.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Published in CEPA<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Agentura.ru 2023<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Since Putin\u2019s plan to win a short military war in Ukraine has visibly failed, Russia\u202fis\u202fgetting \u202fready to wage a long and devastating war in Ukraine. To do so, it must adjust the economy to the new conditions and increase weapons production. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":200,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-199","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-new-nobility"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agentura.ru\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agentura.ru\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agentura.ru\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agentura.ru\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agentura.ru\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=199"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/agentura.ru\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":202,"href":"https:\/\/agentura.ru\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199\/revisions\/202"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agentura.ru\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/200"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agentura.ru\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agentura.ru\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=199"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agentura.ru\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}