The contract is written so that if a student is expelled, disappears, or refuses to pay, the obligation automatically falls on their parents. If the parents don't pay, the amount is collected through court bailiffs with bank account freezes, travel bans, and other joys of life. Imagine a sixteen year old from a small Ural town who watched his favorite bloggers and streamers advertising Alabuga and decided to enroll while his parents earn 30 thousand rubles between them. Once he arrives and realizes the conditions are hell and wants to go home, he is told he owes 420 thousand rubles or his parents' accounts will be frozen, so he has no choice but to endure.
The fixed part of a student's salary is only 3 thousand rubles, and the rest is a bonus that can be given or cut at any time, so most students actually get 30 to 40 thousand rubles for a ten to twelve hour workday often with no days off. The work schedule is set by the employer, meaning there is no fixed schedule at all, and you cannot find out your actual conditions and pay until after you sign the contract when it's too late to refuse. Students are forced to work on defense orders assembling Shahed drones, which makes the enterprise a completely legitimate military target, and that's not just theory. On April 2, 2024, two drones attacked the hostel complex at the drone factory where students and workers live, injuring fourteen people including at least four African girls who had been brought in through the Alabuga Start program.
Students are forced to work overtime and have their vacations taken away, and most of the work is not what was promised in the ads but low skilled labor like making phone calls, processing documents, and sending letters. Basically all the work that regular cluster employees don't want to do gets dumped on teenagers, on top of assembling drones in the workshops. According to descriptions from students and journalists, it is classic slave labor disguised as education. When the management decided to openly ask for volunteers to assemble drones, Shagivaleev stood in front of a line of students and asked for volunteers to step forward, and on video from above you can see that every single student in the front row stepped forward in perfect unison, obviously a staged show.
Students are forced to work on chemically hazardous production lines with poor ventilation, high temperatures, no proper protective gear, and their complaints about worsening health, skin problems, breathing issues, and general malaise are systematically ignored. The leadership calls this complaining and doesn't want to deal with it because they need to assemble thousands of drones, and they present all this prison style behavior as masculine education. It's all written into the contract that students must participate in military tactical paintball games on weekends, and for refusing they get a reprimand or expulsion. Before each game, students unload trucks of equipment themselves, and the game is a reenactment of war against fascists where the losers are punished by being shot with paintballs at point blank range in what they call executions.
They are forced to run, dig trenches in the rain, and assault heights without weapons while cluster employees shoot at them from above. Several parents filed complaints with the prosecutor's office, but Alabuga provided documents claiming everything was legal and students participated voluntarily, where voluntary means you get expelled for refusing and expulsion costs you 400 thousand rubles. Beyond paintball, there are physical punishments, bullying, systematic humiliation, phones are actively confiscated, students are forced to unlock them, and their messages are read. If you talk to journalists about what happens inside, the fine is from 500 thousand to 2 million rubles, all written into documents that teenagers and their parents sign when enrolling.