Thursday, January 30, 2025

Almost Five Million Russian Aged 14 to 35 Now Don’t Study or Work, Youth Agency Head Says

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Jan. 28 – According to the most recent statistics, for 2023, 4.7 million Russians between the ages of 14 and 35 neither study nor work, Grigory Gurov, the head of the Russian Agency for Young People. That means that every eight young person in the country “doesn’t see his or her place in society and has dropped out.”
     Officials refer to such people as the NET Generation, that is, people “not in employment, education or training, Yevgeny Chernyshov of the Nakanune news agency says, adding that experts say that such people have no interest in work or study but are only concerned with having a good time (nakanune.ru/articles/123085/).
    What is worrisome, the journalist continues, is that the share of young people who aren’t integrated into society more closely is much higher than their share in the population as a whole, 13 percent as compared to nine percent; and the situation may be getting worse: of the 1.6 million school graduates, only 0.7 percent have found or chosen to find work.  
This phenomenon of non-working and non-studying young people is relatively new, Gurov says; and while the government has programs to combat it, there is a real danger that if young Russians don’t go to work by age 30, they will remain a generation of Oblomovs their entire lives.
What makes these figures especially critical now is that were these young people to go to work, the need for immigrant labor would be far less and the ability of the government to raise an army far easier than is now the case. But the fact that the government is now focused on this suggests there will soon be new moves to integrate young Russians in the work force.

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