Moscow’s children’s rights commissioner, Olga Yaroslavskaya, has proposed lowering Russia’s effective working age to 12 and reviving Soviet-era summer labour camps for schoolchildren. Framed as opportunity, this is a last-ditch attempt to recover from battlefield deaths, the brain drain of over a million young professionals, and the thin generations of the 1990s. Indeed, Russia is confronting a workforce shortage its central bank has described as the most severe in the nation’s modern history. By the end of 2024, Russian companies were short roughly 2.6 million workers, and Labour Minister Anton Kotyakov has told President Putin the economy will need close to 11 million additional people by 2030.
These pressures are structural and, in large part, self-inflicted. Mobilisation and military recruitment have drained hundreds of thousands of working-age men from the economy, while emigration has carried away much of the educated young professional class the country can least afford to lose. The damage is layered onto a demographic decline decades in the making, as smaller cohorts enter the labour force and an ageing population steadily exits it. With migrant labour from Central Asia also contracting, every conventional source of new workers is narrowing at once.
Against this backdrop, the logic of the proposal becomes clear. Employers are already reaching toward the young – industrial sites have begun advertising factory wages to teenager – and lowering the working age would formalise what necessity has started. Presented as structure and earning opportunity for the young, it is in substance a measure of how few options remain. A state that cannot replace its dead or recall its exiles is being asked to look to its children.
