Russian Health Ministry Wants to Levy Enormous Fines on Med School Graduates who Don’t Work in Their Field

Paul Goble

    Staunton, May 4 – In Soviet times, the government ordered university graduates where they had to work for the first several years after graduation, a way to ensure that the state’s needs were met. Some officials would like to go back to that given that an increasing share of graduates are choosing not to work in the fields they have been trained.

    But the idea is extremely unpopular especially among the already restive young, and so the Russian government is considering how to restore control over where graduates work in at least some fields in ways that will accomplish the same thing but without looking like the restoration of detested Soviet practice.

    Russia currently suffers a shortage of more than 23,000 doctors and 63,000 other medical personnel, especially in government clinics and hospitals; and so it is not surprising that the health ministry has come up with an idea that may soon spread to others. It proposes imposing enormous fines on those who get medical training but then don’t work in that field.

    According to Rossiiskaya Gazeta, the fines the ministry has called for setting will be equivalent to the cost of the training such medical personnel will have received, an amount averaging 3.7 million rubles (35,000 US dollars), an enormous sum for those just beginning their working careers (rg.ru/2025/05/04/shtrafy-dlia-vypusknikov-medvuzov-za-otkaz-ot-otrabotki-mogut-uvelichit-vtroe.html).

    The measure has not yet become law; but if it does, then the Kremlin is likely to push for the imposition of analogous fines for graduates in other fields where there is a shortage, thus reviving a Soviet practice by means of a post-Soviet method, an approach that will be little less repressive but far more acceptable than simply going back to the past.