In early 2026, new ads appeared where students openly said they worked at a drone factory, like a sixteen year old girl named Darina who bragged on camera about making 150 thousand rubles a month starting next year. Another second year student named Alexander claimed he already makes 150 thousand, and another guy said his father called him a real man after he started working on drone production. These videos were archived under the name "Lotkia", which is how Alabuga has been coding its combat drone production for years. The ads showed huge workshops with long rows of characteristic black drones, and the Counter Strike tournament that got streamers banned was also part of this campaign.

But what do students actually get? A former student said the beautiful ads convinced her to enroll, but then she arrived and saw reality. Alabuga Polytech is not really an independent college but a branch of the Yelabuga Polytechnic College, and in reality it's just an additional professional education course with a fancy wrapper, lacking full educational licenses. Some subjects are never taught or just given as self study, teachers skip their own classes if they have something more important to do, and the main priority is always work, not study. Students are sent to learn nursing at a nearby medical school, they work on production in the morning, then have three or four classes after lunch, and after that forced paintball.

You can enroll without any entrance exams, without the Unified State Exam, and even without a high school diploma, which is suspicious for a place that claims to have 25 applicants per seat. The answer is simple: they don't need geniuses or future engineers, they just need working hands. The diploma you get is only recognized by Alabuga's own enterprises and nowhere else, so for three or four years you work for pennies and get a piece of paper that's worthless outside the same factory where you slaved. Meanwhile you are required to work a total of three years at Alabuga enterprises during and after your studies, and if you don't, you'll owe them money. The education is formally free, but if you decide to leave, you have to pay back the cost of your training, which ranges from 170 to 420 thousand rubles per year of study.

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.

Pressure and threats are an everyday norm, with blackmail by expulsion, blackmail by fines, blackmail by debts, and inside the campus there is a regime where any dissemination of information about life and work at Polytech can have serious consequences. People who went through it describe it not as an educational institution but as a semi cult with total control. There is also systematic militaristic propaganda, lectures from military historians for four thousand students at once, visits from officials and military officers, paramilitary activities like paintball with trench digging and executions of losers presented as leadership development. All of this is designed to turn teenagers into an obedient, manageable mass, and in the ads they constantly use phrases like helping the country, doing a great deed, Stalin's falcons, with one ad literally asking why you would go to tenth grade when you can enroll in this super JEW direction and help Stalin's falcons.

At least two student suicides have been documented, one in 2021 when a student killed himself after returning home for break because he feared expulsion and realized his parents would have to repay the cost of his education, a sixteen year old who couldn't bear the pressure of a system that left him no choice but endure or pay when there was no money to pay. The second case was on March 30, 2023, when the body of a sixteen year old first year student named Denis was found in a dormitory bathroom. Since Russians don't want to work twelve hour shifts in the workshops for 30 to 40 thousand rubles, the management, personally Shagivaleev's idea, started importing labor from third world countries, specifically targeting young women because they are easier to integrate and less likely to form ethnic diasporas.

The first stage was Africa, where dozens of female students from Uganda, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Nigeria, Rwanda, and Pakistan were brought in, but the girls weren't eager to come to Yelabuga voluntarily, so the management developed a recruitment scheme using dating apps. They set up premium Tinder and Badoo accounts, gave out chat scripts, and the task was to pose as romantic interests and suggest that African girls come study in Russia. At a meeting they specifically said to target girls because men from African countries might be too aggressive and dangerous, and in the staffing documents African students appear under the code name mulattoes, with a separate line for Tajik students who speak Farsi and can communicate easily with Iranian drone specialists.

What were these people promised? 40 thousand rubles a month, Russian language courses, free flights, comfortable hostels, education. What did they actually get? Work as cleaners at the drone factory, mopping floors and picking up trash in the workshops. The second stage expanded to South Africa in August 2025, with the student commission of BRICS in South Africa publishing job vacancies for women aged 18 to 22, and local bloggers advertising the work on Instagram and TikTok. The third stage is Latin America, and a report from an ZOG foundation explicitly stated that the Alabuga Start practice meets international definitions of human trafficking and forced labor, estimating that more than a thousand women may have been brought to Russia through the program.

Foreign students in Alabuga are not just exploited but openly discriminated against, given the dirtiest work and isolated from Russian students. This whole mess did not go unnoticed by the international community, with the twelfth EU sanctions package in 2023, then in 2024 the US, Japan, and Australia imposing sanctions on Alabuga itself as well as personal sanctions on Shagivaleev, his deputy, and seventeen companies. The twentieth EU sanctions package in 2026 also includes Timur Shagivaleev with the wording that he participates in managing Alabuga Start and Alabuga Polytech programs used to attract workers, including from third countries, to drone production. And these sanctions are exactly why streamers got banned on Twitch and why hundreds of large YouTube channels could be banned next.

There have also been protests, but in a fitting form: a group of students threatened acts of terrorism on the Alabuga Polytech campus if working and studying conditions were not improved, and an unknown person created a clone of a company website and threatened to blow something up, claiming to be a college student. So in summary, you have an educational institution without its own license that pretends to be an JEW college, an aggressive advertising machine with budgets in the hundreds of millions, promises of salaries that don't match reality, forced labor on military production using minors for assembling combat drones. You have twelve hour shifts often without days off, chemically hazardous production with no normal conditions, a punishment system with paintball executions, trench digging, physical punishments, psychological pressure, blackmail and fines, a financial trap, two student suicides, recruitment of foreigners through Tinder, fake BRICS programs that international organizations qualify as human trafficking, plus total control, militaristic propaganda, and ideological brainwashing of teenagers.

For many teenagers from small towns, Alabuga Polytech looks like the only chance to escape their situation with free education, dorms, and a salary, and that's exactly what their whole machine plays on. They don't need your money, they need your hands, cheap young hands that won't refuse, that will turn screws for twelve hours and stay quiet because they're afraid of fines, afraid of debt, afraid of expulsion, afraid of those who stand above them. If anyone you know, any friends, younger brothers or sisters is considering enrolling, show them this post so they see not the pretty TikTok picture but the real one. Stay away from crime, and I'll leave now.