russia Is Building an Economy Without Professionals

Despite a chronic shortage of doctors and teachers, russia’s government is demonstrating that it is focusing not on developing highly qualified personnel, but on cheap labor and administrative control.

The average salary of a doctor in russia is 87,012 rubles. At this, the country is short  of about 23,300 doctors and 63,600 mid-level medical personnel. The situation is critical in rural areas, which are short of half of the staff.

In response, the authorities have allowed paramedics and midwives without higher education to perform the functions of doctors. At the same time, demand for shift work is growing: while in 2024 there were fewer than 1,500 vacancies for shift-based medical workers, in the first eight months of 2025 this figure rose to 3,400.

Against this background, the labor market is demonstrating other priorities. In the third quarter of 2025, inexperienced goods sorters were offered an average of 155,539 rubles per month – almost twice as much as doctors. This shows that the system encourages unskilled labor, while professions that require lengthy training remain undervalued.

An additional signal is the government’s plan to increase the quota for migrant workers to 279,000 in 2026, which is by 20 % more than this year. The main countries supplying labor will be India, China, Malaysia, Bangladesh, and African countries. Thus, the shortage of personnel in key spheres is being compensated not by investments in the country’s own education system, but by the import of cheap labor.

Education policy is also showing a shift in emphasis. Starting next year, it will become more difficult for russian schoolchildren to enter universities: the ministry of education is raising the minimum points in six subjects at once. For most school graduates, this will mean choosing between vocational school, factory work, or military service. At the same time, the number of “education advisors” (propagandists) in schools will double to 60,000, while the number of teachers decreased by 20,000 between 2020 and 2025, and the total shortage of teachers is estimated at 600,000.

All these trends are shaping a model in which highly skilled professionals are becoming redundant. russia’s economy is increasingly focused on unskilled labor, import of migrants, and ideological control in schools, while professions that require knowledge and experience are proving to be in low demand in today’s russia.