Digital platforms in the Russian labor market: Paradoxes and contradictions of transformation

The relevance of the study is substantiated by the contradictory role of digital platforms: being the dominant infrastructure of the Russian labor market, they do not solve but reproduce the problems of informal employment and regional inequality. The aim of the work is to go beyond the observation of the quantitative growth of platforms and to reveal the mechanisms of institutionalization of these disparities. Scientific novelty lies in the synthesis of structural and institutional approaches, which for the first time allows conceptualizing the key paradoxes of the Russian model: technological formalization of informality, reinforcement of regional inequality, and algorithmic autonomy. The methodological framework was based on a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods: secondary analysis of data from Rosstat and platforms (2020–2025), the author's content analysis of job descriptions (N = 4500) to identify informal hiring practices via lexical markers, and modeling of vacancy closing time to assess regional efficiency (N = 9600). The findings demonstrate that platforms serve as an infrastructure for the mass institutionalization of informal relations, with the share of informal vacancies in mass segments reaching 60–85%. It has been revealed that platform infrastructure does not smooth regional asymmetries but technologically reinforces them, concentrating high-income digital jobs in the capitals and preserving low-skilled, insecure employment in the periphery. It has been shown that the flexibility of platform employment leads to either strict algorithmic control (in the gig segment) or increased instability (in freelancing), both of which result in the transfer of social risks to the employee. The limitations of the study include the lack of open official data on informal employment, which determines the prospects for further research on the long-term social consequences of platformization and the effectiveness of differentiated regulatory measures.