Russian 'factory soldiers' exposed

Russian conscripts are often used as unpaid labour

Pictures of underfed young conscripts toiling hard at generals' dachas may not be unfamiliar to Russian television viewers these days.

But the rent-a-soldier scam exposed earlier this week in Samara, 600 miles east of Moscow, has taken aback even hardened observers of Russia's underfunded military.

Russian TV said six conscripts from a motorised rifle battalion were discovered working long shifts, day in, day out, as porters at a local cardboard factory, where they had also been housed for six months.

Their commander had decided that instead of honing their combat skills, the soldiers would better serve the Russian army by earning him a steady income of one dollar a day each.

Anton Panshin, one of the soldiers finally freed from the factory stint, says he dreamt of the army from childhood - an unusual aspiration in modern Russia.

He was very glad to be recruited to the motorised rifle regiment, and the high point of his service came when the defence minister himself arrived to inspect his unit.

Hotline

When Anton and several fellow gunners were told to pack their bags, he thought they were going on a duty trip.

"The commander gave the orders and we thought he knew better. I didn't know where they were taking us," Anton said.

Many construction sites rely on soldiers' labour

Russian military prosecutors have put Anton's commander under arrest and set up a round-the-clock phone line for reporting similar incidents.

They admit that conscripts in Russia are being used as free labour for all sorts of purposes by their officers, from building cottages to baby-sitting.

But hiring soldiers out for profit has never been reported before, they insist.

"Some officers accept that the law is being violated in such cases but treat it as insignificant," Samara military prosecutor Sergey Devyatov says.

The Samara hotline, in the meantime, has already received more than 20 reports of illegal use of soldiers' labour.

And the Russian TV crew that interviewed the Samara prosecutor found a group of conscripts building a brick fence around a private business not far away from the prosecutor's office.

BBC Monitoring, based in Caversham in southern England, selects and translates information from radio, television, press, news agencies and the Internet from 150 countries in more than 70 languages.