Slavery in Russia

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While slavery has not been widespread on the territory of what is now Russia since the introduction of Christianity in the tenth century, serfdom in Russia, which was in many ways similar to landless peasantry in Feudal Europe, only ended in February 19th, 1861 when Russian Emperor Alexander II issued The Emancipation of the serfs in 1861. Emancipation of state-owned serfs occurred in 1866.^[1]

The Russian term krepostnoi krestyanin (крепостной крестьянин) is usually translated as "serf": an unfree person (to varying degrees according to existing laws) who unlike a slave cannot be owned individually as property, but can't freely live on or move to any other land than the one they are "attached" to without acquiescence of the land owner, whose land they inhabits mostly as share cropping farmers and labourers. This land can then be bought and sold similarly to peasants on land belonging to European nobility like Lords, Earls, Dukes etc.

The 2023 Global Slavery Index estimates that there are 1,899,000 people - approximately 1.26% of the population, currently living in illegal slavery-like conditions in Russia according to Russian law. This includes forced labour, forced prostitution, debt bondage, forced servile marriage, exploitation of children, and forced prison labour most belonging to marginalised groups like undocumented immigrants from the Caucasus and former Soviet states.^[2]

In Kievan Rus' and Grand Duchy of Moscow, legal systems usually referred to a special type of serfs as kholopy. Individuals could become kholop as a result of capture, selling themselves, being sold for debts, committing crimes, or marriage to a kholop. Until the late 10th century, the kholopy represented a majority among the servants who worked lords' lands. The power a kholop's master had over his life varied over the centuries. Generally, this power increased, culminating in the late 16th century with the abolition of the Yuriev Den' [ru; uk], a specially designed day of the year when serfs could freely switch the land they were living on and therefore switch their masters. This power then slowly began to degrade during the next centuries with reforms of Alexei Mikhailovich and Peter the Great.

The Russian lands continued in their historic function as a source of slaves for outsiders.^[3] For example, in 1382 the Golden Horde under Khan Tokhtamysh sacked Moscow, burning the city and carrying off thousands of inhabitants as slaves; similar raids occurred routinely until well into the 16th century.^[4] In 1521, the combined forces of Crimean Khan Mehmed I Giray and his Kazan allies attacked Moscow and captured thousands of slaves.^[5][6] In 1571, the Crimean Tatars attacked and sacked Moscow, burning everything but the Kremlin and taking thousands of captives as slaves^[7] for the Crimean slave trade. In Crimea, about 75% of the population consisted of slaves.^[8] The Crimean–Nogai raids into East Slavic lands continued into the 18th century.

An anonymous Lithuanian author wrote in De moribus tartarorum, lituanorum et moscorum:

Among these unfortunates there are many strong ones; if they [the Tatars] have not castrated them yet, they cut off their ears and nostrils, burned cheeks and foreheads with the burning iron and forced them to work with their chains and shackles during the daylight, and sit in the prisons during the night; they are sustained by the meager food consisting of the dead animals' meat, rotten, full of worms, which even a dog would not eat. The youngest women are kept for wanton pleasures ...^[9]

By the sixteenth century, the serf population of the Grand Duchy of Moscow consisted mostly of those who had had become serfs owing to poverty.^[10] They worked predominantly as household servants, among the richest families, and indeed generally produced less than they consumed.^[11] Laws forbade slave owners to free slaves in times of famine in order to avoid feeding them, and slaves generally remained with their owning family for a long time; the Domostroy, an advice book, speaks of the need to choose slaves of good character and to provide for them properly.^[12] Slavery remained a major institution in Russia until 1723, when Peter the Great converted the household slaves into house serfs. The government of Tsar Feodor III had formally converted Russian agricultural slaves into serfs earlier, in 1679.^[10][13]

Indigenous peoples of Siberia – notably the Yakuts and the Buryats of Eastern Siberia – practised slavery on a small scale.^[14] With the conquest of Siberia in the 16th and 17th centuries, Russians enslaved natives in military operations and in Cossack raids.^[14] Cases involving native women were frequent, held as concubines, sometimes mortgaged to other men and traded for commercial profit.^[14] The Russian government generally opposed the conversion of natives to Christianity because it would free them from paying the yasak, the fur tribute.^[14] The government decreed that the non-Christian slaves were to be freed.^[14] This in turn led local Russian owners of slaves to petition the government for conversion and even involved forced conversions of their slaves.^[14] The rules stipulated that the native convert became a serf of the converter.^[14] As an indication of the extent of the slavery system, one voyevoda reported in 1712 that "there is hardly a Cossack in Yakutsk who does not have natives as slaves".^[14]

Russian conquest of the Caucasus led to the abolition of slavery by the 1860s^[15][16] and the conquest of the Central Asian Islamic khanates of Bukhara, Samarkand, and Khiva by the 1870s.^[17] A notorious slave market for captured Russian and Persian slaves was centred in the Khanate of Khiva from the 17th to the 19th century.^[18][19] At the beginning of the 21st century Chechens and Ingush kept Russian captives as slaves or in slave-like conditions in the mountains of the northern Caucasus.^[20]

Internal migrants from Russia's poorer regions and foreign migrants are reportedly trafficked (sometimes involving drugging and kidnapping) and then forced to work against their will in brick factories and small farms in Dagestan. Many of Russia's migrant workers are irregular migrants, a status that makes them particularly vulnerable to modern slavery.^[21]

Recent (2009–2012) reports have identified human trafficking and slavery of Uzbek nationals in contemporary Russian society.^{[22][23][24][25]}