Russian oligarch wants 72-hour workweeks to ‘adapt faster’ to sanctions
Lock the doors, cancel the weekend and keep the lights on until midnight: that is Oleg Deripaska’s recipe for a sanctions-choked Russia. The metals tycoon told his 230,000 Telegram followers that the country’s only competitive edge left is an almost folkloric capacity to graft. His timetable: 8 a.m.–8 p.m., six days a week, starting now.
Deripaska, founder of aluminium giant Rusal, dismissed talk of a cyclical downturn. “This crisis is deeper,” he wrote. “We are moving from global opportunities to regional ones, with every possible restriction.” Translation: the West has fenced off the playground, so Russia must turn the factory floor into a dormitory.
Why 72-hour weeks sound sane to the kremlin
Moscow’s official growth print for 2025: a skeletal 1 %, down from 4.3 % last year. Oil is back above $100, yet that windfall arrives with an asterisk: most cargoes travel shadow-fleet routes, insurers demand piracy premiums and Asian refiners shave $20 off each barrel. The budget, historically one-third fed by hydrocarbons, is gasping.
Enter the “national trait” argument. Deripaska claims Russians historically survive shocks by “coming together and working more”—a narrative the Kremlin has already road-tested. Parliament is mulling a draft law that lets regions suspend Sunday-rest rules during “periods of external economic pressure.” Translation: legal scaffolding for the 72-hour week is halfway built.
The human calculus is brutal but simple. Longer shifts postpone the need for imported machinery the country can no longer buy, while keeping unemployment—and dissent—statistically low. A 20 % wage hike for overnight hours costs less than retooling a smelter with black-market German parts at 3× markup.
Energy windfall masks a structural dead end
Oil futures have rallied 70 % this year, yet Deripaska warned the same Middle-East chaos driving prices could torpedo global demand. If China tips into a property-led recession, Brent could collapse faster than the ruble. The oligarch’s timetable is therefore a hedge: squeeze every man-hour out of the upswing before the next downswing arrives.
Western sanctions architects are watching. One EU diplomat told TechCurrent: “If Russia’s answer to technology blockades is simply to keep workers chained to the conveyor belt longer, we’ve already won the long game.” Fatigue-driven productivity drops, safety catastrophes and brain drain are inevitable; the only variable is speed.
Still, in the near term, twelve-hour Saturdays could add roughly 4 % to industrial output without a single imported chip—enough to shave the budget deficit by 0.3 % of GDP, according to Moscow’s Presidential Academy. For a government that just re-introduced gasoline export bans to quell domestic inflation, every decimal counts.
The ghost of stakhanov nods approvingly
Joseph Stalin’s 1930s shock brigades set production records by glorifying marathon shifts. Deripaska’s post reads like a post-industrial remix: same tempo, Spotify playlist. The difference is that Soviet workers believed in a radiant future; today’s counterparts scroll Telegram images of oligarch yachts docked in Istanbul while they clock overtime in Krasnoyarsk.
Expect pushback. Labor codes already allow only four hours of overtime per day; widespread violations could trigger court challenges. Yet courts rarely rule against strategic enterprises, and the Kremlin has rebranded compliance as patriotism. The recipe—nationalism plus exhaustion—has worked before.
Bottom line: Russia is betting that sweat can substitute for semiconductors. If the wager fails, the Economy will still be on its knees—only now with blistered feet. Deripaska’s stopwatch is ticking; the rest of the world just got a midnight reminder that sanctions alone don’t dismantle an Economy. They merely change the shape of the cage.