Russia is discouraging requests from conscientious objectors to swap compulsory military service for stints of alternative service, a rights activist complained Monday.

"The main problem is that following the strategy of the General Staff the government is doing all it can to torpedo everything that concerns citizens' rights to alternative service," said Sergei Sorokin, a member of the Moscow Helsinki Group.

"The government is doing all it can not to let this happen," Sorokin told reporters. "Hundreds of thousands of people are fighting for this right."

Under Russian law, young men who qualify as conscientious objectors must do one-and-a-half years of of alternative service, compared to a year for regular military service.

The service involves doing menial jobs for the military or working as post officer workers, hospital orderlies or carers in orphanages.

Since 1992, Russians have had a constitutional right to alternative service, but it was only in 2004 that strongman Vladimir Putin signed into law a bill allowing draftees to sign up for non-military service.

This was hailed as a major step in reforming Russia's unpopular armed forces, but very few people take up this option, Sorokin said, blaming hostility from the military and even courts.

Sorokin said that requests to carry out alternative service were frowned up by officialdom and frequently rebuffed by different layers of the civilian and military bureaucracy.

Some 300,000 young men are drafted each year, while only 800-900 young men opt to carry out alternative service.

But Sorokin believes a quarter of all draftees might opt for the alternative if the government did not discourage them.

Of the young men currently carrying out alternative service, around 500 are Jehovah's Witnesses.

The rest want to skip the draft for a variety of other reasons including their convictions or simply a desire to avoid brutal hazing or accidents that are frequent in the Russian army.

"They are afraid of being killed," said Sorokin who over the past 20 years has advised several thousand young men who wanted to apply for alternative service.

Many would-be Russian draftees pay bribes to avoid being drafted. An average bribe is between 100,000 rubles ($3,385)and 300,000 rubles ($10,155), according to Sorokin's estimates.