“Truly Like a Second Family”. How Russian Student Squads, Created Back in the USSR, Now Serve the State — and Putin Personally

The Russian Student Squads is the largest state youth movement in Russia. It differs from the others in that it offers seasonal paid work to its participants: on construction sites, in schools, at agricultural enterprises, and more.

Some students join the movement as early as their freshman year: some are lured by stories about the best years of their life, some go there driven by an idea. At the same time, other students, faced with low wages, poor living conditions and the feeling that no one will protect their labor rights, strongly recommend never to get involved with the squads.

Why the youth movement, founded back in the USSR, was revived in modern Russia and how the state benefits from the work of participants. From building dangerous facilities to harvesting Putin's vineyards — the story by University Transparency Lab in collaboration with Groza.

The names of the individuals have been changed at their request.

Revival of the Soviet movement: how the modern Russian Student Squads began and how it is organized

The Russian Student Squads (RSS) are the successors of the All-Union Student Construction Brigades. In 2024, the organization celebrated its 65th anniversary — exactly that many years have passed since the first group of Komsomol members went to work on the virgin land in Kazakhstan, where they built 16 objects — houses, facilities and even entire streets. According to RSS calculations, from 1965 to 1991, almost 13 million people took part in the work of student squads.

In the USSR, "going to the virgin lands" meant going to work on agricultural land: cultivating it, plowing, and harvesting crops.

The organization was reborn in 2004, when the All-Russian Forum of Student Squads was held in the Kremlin Palace in honor of the 45th anniversary of the movement. Since then, students have built facilities for the APEC Summit in Vladivostok (Far East of Russia) in 2012 and the Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games in Sochi. They have also participated in the construction of infrastructure facilities at the “Plesetsk” and “Vostochny” cosmodromes, as well as soccer stadiums and regional airports in preparation for the 2018 FIFA World Cup.

The annual meeting of the leaders of the countries participating in the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC). At that time, the members of APEC included China, Russia, the USA, Japan, and other countries.

The new Russian movement inherited traditions from the Soviet movement. For example, its participants are called “fighters”; those who have been there for more than three years are called “old men”. The students once coined that title themselves, but now it has become all but official.

Symbols are also an important part of the fighters' identity. The main symbol of the RSS is the “fighter's jacket”, a special lightweight jacket with patches, emblems, chevrons and symbols, by which one can recognize the region, squad, position, industry, and places of work during the work semesters of the fighter.

Currently, the squads number more than 200,000 fighters from 83 federal subjects of Russia, including the occupied territories of Ukraine. Putin has repeatedly noted that the groups contribute to “solving key national tasks” and has also supported the work of student squads in “liberated territories”, although he has called it dangerous.

“If you want to find a good part-time job with the best conscientious employers in the country, come to us. If you want to spend the best summer ever and make the truest friends for life, we're the place to go. You want to meet your love — it's among us. If you want to travel for free from Vladivostok to Kaliningrad, or maybe go to Turkey and earn money instead of spending it, come to us,” says Mikhail Kiselev, the chairman of the RSS and a member of the State Duma from United Russia.

Mikhail Kiselev has been the head of the movement since 2021. He became a deputy and deputy chairman of the Youth Policy Committee in the State Duma in the same year.

Who is Mikhail Kiselev? ↓

On Kiselev’s initiative, student squads also support the war participants. For example, after the opening ceremony for “Defenders of the Motherland” foundation he proclaimed that he, together with the student squads, intends to help “create comfortable conditions for our military and their families”. In October 2023 Kiselev arranged a deal with the head of the foundation, Putin’s niece Anna Tsivileva, about a “Snow Paratroopers” initiative, in which members of the student squads will help military families with housework.

The “Defenders of the Fatherland” Foundation is a Russian state-funded organization established to support veterans of the war in Ukraine, including wounded soldiers and families of the deceased. It provides legal, psychological, and financial assistance, and coordinates services between veterans and government institutions. The foundation is part of the Kremlin’s broader effort to promote patriotic narratives and maintain public support for the war.

The “Snow Paratroopers” is a youth volunteer initiative that includes a range of activities aimed at promoting volunteerism, career guidance, youth employment, civic engagement, and public outreach. It also focuses on “patriotic” education.

Student squads helping the military see support from the United Russia party, which Kiselev is a member of. The first time UR involved student squads in a “humanitarian mission” was in June 2022, when they were sent to Lugansk to work with local children and clean up sites of social significance. As soon as in August Mikhail Kiselev reported that medics, construction teams and youth counsellors work in Donbass under United Russia’s patronage. By 1 March 2024 United Russia had held 8 “humanitarian missions” in the “new regions”, involving 200 members of student squads.

Each regional headquarter of RSS has their own governing bodies — notably, their members are chosen by student squad members from the lowest level to the federal level. Such squads exist on the basis of universities, schools and colleges, usually they are led by two people: a commander and a commissar (commander's deputy). These people are chosen during the common gathering of the squad’s “fighters”.

“In my time, around 2019-2020, an ex-government official from Moscow was the head of the Crimean RSS. He won the local election, but I for one am not sure if there were any other candidates”, — says an ex-member of RSS from Saint-Petersburg.

The Congress is the main governing body of the entire movement; it elects the members of all other key federal bodies and determines the priority areas of the organization's activities. According to the charter of the RSS, regional branches can establish legal entities themselves, as well as liquidate them by their own decision. Because of this, RSS does not have one legal entity with branches or representative offices in the regions, but at least 63 separate legal entities.

At present, the movement is financed from two main sources — from government budget allocations and through profits from the provision of employees to customer organizations. According to our calculations, from 2022 to 2024, various legal entities of RSS received almost 48m rubles (US$ 568,031) from the Presidential Grants Fund, and applications for another 71m ₽ (US$ 840,236) are currently pending approval. In 2023 the revenue of one of the movement's subsidiaries, the commercial company “RSS Engineering”, was 487m ₽ (US$ 5,763,576), almost 65m of which (US$ 769,265) was net profit.

For many students, student squads are their first work experience and an opportunity to earn money in the company of their peers during summer vacation at university. However, sometimes young people encounter problems ranging from personal conflicts with co-workers to poor living conditions at the sites and incomplete payments. Many stories are posted online by RSS workers, for example, in a VK (popular Russian social media) public group “Overheard in SSs”.

“If the Conditions Are Better There, Then It’s Perfect”: Working on Putin’s Vineyards

Despite the fact that modern student squads are the successors of the Soviet ones, there are still differences. One of them is the salary: today's “fighters” are paid for their work, while their predecessors worked for free. The current RSS is more complex and has many legal entities, some of which cooperate with large companies and authorities, sending students there: fighters work for “Russian Railways”, “Rosatom”, “Gazprom” and “Tatneft”, to name a few.

"Russian Railways" — Russia’s state-owned national railway company, responsible for passenger and freight transportation across the country and abroad.

"Gazprom" — a state-controlled energy giant and the world’s largest natural gas exporter, overseeing gas production, transportation, and sales.

"Tatneft" — one of Russia’s largest oil companies, headquartered in Tatarstan, involved in oil exploration, production, refining, and petrochemicals.

Sometimes they are able to work not only “for the country's good”, but directly for Putin himself — at his winery “Krinitsa” near Gelendzhik in Krasnodar region (Putin’s luxurious seaside palace is located in Gelendzhik). This exact winery was mentioned several times in the 2021 investigation by Alexey Navalny. University Trasparency Lab and Groza were told about this by Lera, who received an offer to work there this year. The girl lives in Saint-Petersburg, where the squad heads mostly have to look for a job by themselves — the regional head gets involved only when the squad cannot find anything.

“Last year we couldn’t find a job for a long time. It was the first year we didn’t want to go to Crimea, but the main employers were there”, Lera explains. This was how they found a job at “Krinitsa” — a winery near Gelendzhik. Lera refused to share the contract and other documents, but University Trasparency Lab and Groza were able to find public evidence that this vineyard was visited by other student squads — for example, the agricultural squad “Rassvet” based at Vologda State University.

“If the conditions are better there, then it’s perfect” , says Lera. “No negative emotions like “oh, the horror, it’s Putin’s vineyard”.

For six weeks of work, the girl earned around 50,000 ₽ (US$ 591). Lera also stated that the employer’s treatment was “nice”: they were trained, told about the vineyards, taken for a tour at the winery, and in the end “even gifted branded mugs”.

Yet, the trip was not without problems either. Lera says that the squad did not have a first aid station, so when young people came down with rotavirus, they had to treat themselves. One girl got so sick that she had to be taken to hospital in Gelendzhik. Also, the students were prohibited from carrying video- and sound-recording devices, and every day they passed a main entry checkpoint “like at the airport”. Things were left right on the floor, and phones were not carried at all, so the squad did not take any pictures at Putin’s vineyard.

Lera told us that a Russia-residing Frenchman was in charge at “Krinitsa”. According to her, once he gathered the “fighters” after a workday and gave a motivational speech in broken Russian. He said harvesting grapes was hard, but necessary, “just like giving birth”.

“You had to do 1,000 bushes a day per person”, Lera continues. “By the middle of the season, they said that other kinds of work would have a quota of up to 3,000 bushes per day. If you don’t meet the quota, there can be fines, but they didn’t berate us a lot, as they understood we were students and that we did what we could”.

Under-the-Table Wages from “Rosatom” and Drones Overhead

However, not everybody is lucky enough to find such a “pleasant” workplace as Putin’s vineyards in the country's south. Many RSS “fighters” work at large construction sites of state-owned and other major companies. In 2021, when deputy Mikhail Kiselev became the leader of student squads, RSS and the Ministry of Construction even signed a cooperation agreement, and now more than 35,000 students are working at construction sites of different levels.

Other leaders of the movement are also connected to construction and particularly the Ministry of Construction, Housing and Utilities. For instance, the first head of central RSS headquarters Yury Gordeev became the deputy minister of construction and HCS (housing and communal services) in 2017, and the current head of central headquarters Dmitry Paramonov is a member of the public council of the ministry. With the arrival of Kiselev in 2021, RSS gained a supervisory council, which since its foundation is led by Aleksey Ryabtsevich — general director of the Ministry of Construction, Housing and Utilities’ “United Directorate” (a state-owned and state-run organization).

Many students work not at regular construction sites, but at “Rosatom” nuclear sites (the same “Rosatom” where the wife of Mikhail Kiselev, the head of the movement, also works). It allows the fighters to work at the research reactor construction site or go to nuclear power plants in China, Turkey, Qatar, India, Egypt, or Bangladesh.

Sveta from a construction team in the Altayskiy region went to all-Russian “Peaceful Atom” construction projects twice: first to Ozyorsk, then to Dimitrovgrad. Construction teams usually work at one site during the “third working semester” — in RSS, this is what the two summer working months are called.

“Peaceful Atom” is a nationwide Russian student construction project where members of student squads work on nuclear industry sites, including those managed by Rosatom.

“Ozyorsk is a closed city. That is, there is radiation, a closed factory, and everything is under strict supervision. I had it easier than the others, who were doing physical work at the construction site, because I was assigned to the office, and I was doing paperwork for two months”, says Sveta.

Despite girls in construction teams being treated more gently, at her first construction site Sveta did not only paint and plaster the walls, as they were promised, but also helped boys and “went on the ground” — that is, took part in construction work. For two months of such work she was to receive about 77,000 ₽ (US$ 911), which was better than what she expected: in the contract, the sum for the entire “third working semester” was “much smaller”, but a part of the salary was paid “under the table”. She says that it is commonplace for RSS construction participants to not know the exact size of their salary until it arrives.

In addition to all-Russian construction projects, there are also interregional ones, such as those in the “new territories”. In May 2022, student squads from the LPR and DPR (Lugansk and Donetsk People’s Republic respectively) signed a cooperation agreement with the RSS, and in 2023, the first RSS branches were established in these regions.

The first volunteers from RSS traveled to the occupied territories under the patronage of United Russia. Students from various fields – including medical and construction — participate in “humanitarian missions”. The squad members work in three areas. One involves restoration: dismantling and minor repairs in boarding and regular schools and youth centers. Another involves working with children, assisting as counselors to organize leisure activities for those who have lost access to health camps and school-based programs. Additionally, some students take on roles as junior and mid-level medical staff.

The largest project in which RSS members from all over Russia have participated is the reconstruction of the Saur-Mogila memorial to fallen Soviet soldiers, which was destroyed during the battles in the DPR in 2014. More than 40 RSS members took part in the project, and some of them received the Putin Team award for it. Putin himself commented on the participation of student squads in the restoration of the territories, stating: “The only thing, to be honest, that holds me back from expanding this to a larger scale is security concerns. This needs to be considered carefully”.

The Putin Team Award is a prize established by the "National front" to recognize citizens for their civic engagement and contributions to solving social issues in their regions.

In the summer of 2023, members of the “Medved” student construction squad from the Northern (Arctic) Federal University traveled to the Rostov region to work on several sections of the Don–Donbas water pipeline, which supplies the DPR. The pipeline is maintained by the company Promgidromekhanizatsiya JSC. Sixteen students from Russian universities were also recruited to carry out work under state employ.

Promgidromekhanizatsiya JSC is a Russian company specializing in the production of metal structures for construction, as well as in the design and development of industrial facilities.

No one was forced to go to the Rostov region; it was a “personal initiative by the squad from Arkhangelsk to help the residents of Donbas”, says Roman, who spoke with Groza and University Transparency Lab. According to him, everything seemed fine at first: they arrived at the construction site in July and were given an approximate timeline that the shift would last until 31 August. However, about a week and a half before the project’s scheduled completion, a Ukrainian drone was shot down overhead. Roman recalls that “the rumble was intense”, but they had been warned that such events could happen since the Rostov region borders the DPR. Still, no special instruction was given on how to act in these situations. He emphasized that during the incident, there was hardly anywhere for people to take cover — there was little space under the pipeline, and the surrounding area was an impassable swamp.

“After the explosion, they decided to err on the side of caution and send us back home”, Roman says. “We were told that the site needed to be handed over soon, so we needed to hurry. Besides, work was to continue directly on the border and inside the DPR, where we weren’t allowed”, he explained. He added that he and his teammates signed a new contract retroactively. As a result of the dangerous work, he earned about 130,000 ₽ (US$ 1,544) over two months.

“Finger-Pointing Isn't Always Reasonable”: How Students Justify the Movement's Problems

Students admit that problems in RSS exist and that’s unfair, but addressing them is not customary. Even so, members often complain on social media and in private conversations about low wages. Sometimes, squad members agree to work, for example, as counselors, for 8000–17000 ₽ (US$ 95–202) for a three-week shift, yet even then they face deception.

In summer 2023, Karina worked three shifts as a camp counselor at the “Solnechny” children's camp (owned by “Tatneft”) in Kazan. She was promised a 5,000 ₽ (US$ 59) bonus for completing all her shifts. Karina fulfilled her contract, but neither she nor her colleagues ever received the bonus. When students voiced their frustration, the camp director, Damira Fatykhova, responded that they needed to “learn how to phrase their questions properly”. According to Karina, that was not the first time she encountered these problems: during previous shifts at the same camp, senior counselors initially printed contracts with salaries of half the agreed amount. When Karina pointed out the discrepancy, they assured her that she was mistakenly given the wrong contract template.

Screenshots of the correspondence are available to Groza and University Transparency Lab.

Sometimes student squads independently sign contracts with employers without the involvement of the RSS. “In St. Pete (Saint-Petersburg), this accounts for roughly 70% of employment”, says Igor, a former employee of the city headquarters. Sometimes students sign contracts during their work, as happened with Karina, or after the work is completed. As a result, situations arise where students are promised one rate and working conditions but end up receiving something different.

In 2021, the construction squad “Berkut” from the North Caucasus Federal University faced this exact problem. Rector Dmitry Bespalov offered construction students the opportunity to participate in a major renovation of dormitories to complete their practical training and earn money. The university promised to pay up to 1,500 ₽ (US$ 18) for an eight-hour shift and to provide equipment. However, in reality, the students did not receive the promised tools and had to bring their own. After completing the work, the university handed out contracts stating that their work shift was valued at 400 ₽ (US$ 4.75) — almost three times less than promised.

“They forced us to sign these contracts. They said that if we didn’t sign, we wouldn’t get paid at all”, students reported.

At that time, members of “Berkut” did not expect that the university could leave them without money. Moreover, according to the students, the tools they brought themselves were stolen, even though they were stored in a locked room. The university did nothing about it, and staff even asked them not to file theft reports.

Despite all the problems, participants still see some benefits in being part of the RSS, such as professional training, event organization for participants, team bonding, and a sense of shared culture: “It’s nice to feel like part of a larger movement, not just a group of students at a construction site. There’s also the benefit of informational support — advice, manuals, contacts, new ideas”, shared Igor, a former RSS employee from Saint-Petersburg.

RSS members do undergo training, which is funded from the budget and is therefore free for them:

“We can attend a teachers college. Upon completion, we receive an official certificate of additional professional education as a ‘temporary children’s team leader (counselor)’. When applying for a job at a children’s camp, they already possess the necessary competencies”, says Anastasia from the Perm pedagogical team.

In the construction field, training follows the same pattern but takes place through an architectural and construction college.

“Your squad is where you feel the most comfortable. These are the people you not only work with during the summer [work] season, but also meet regularly in everyday life, we organize various events all the time. It’s truly like a second family. That’s why I have no complaints about the RSS”, says Lera, who worked in Krinitsa.

Anastasia from the Perm squad adds, “Finger-pointing at those who provide you with work and free training is... not always reasonable, in my opinion”.