Slavery in Russia

While slavery has not been widespread on the territory of what is now Russia since the introduction of Christianity in the 10th century, serfdom in Russia, which was in many ways similar to landless peasantry in Catholic Europe, only ended in February 19th, 1861 when Emperor Alexander II ordered the emancipation of the serfs in 1861. The emancipation of state-owned serfs occurred in 1866.Mee, Arthur; Hammerton, J.A.; Innes, Arthur D.;
Harmsworth History of the World: Volume 7
', 1907, Carmelite House, London; p. 5193.

The Russian term () 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.

History

In Kievan Rus' and the Russian principalities, including later the Grand Principality of Moscow, legal systems usually referred to a special type of serfs known as '' kholopy''. Individuals could become a ''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 master had over the life of a ''kholop'' varied over the centuries. Generally, this power increased over time, culminating in the late 16th century when the movement of serfs on George's Day in Autumn—a specially designed day of the year when serfs could freely switch the land they were living on and therefore switch their masters—was forbidden. This power then slowly began to degrade during the next centuries with reforms of Alexei Mikhailovich and Peter the Great.

Russians themselves were enslaved later. 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. In 1521, the combined forces of Crimean Khan Mehmed I Giray and his Kazan allies attacked Moscow and captured thousands of slaves. In 1571, the Crimean Tatars attacked and sacked Moscow, burning everything but the Kremlin and taking thousands of captives as slaves for the Crimean slave trade.
In Crimea, about 75% of the population consisted of slaves. 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'':

By the 16th century, the serf population consisted mostly of those who had had become serfs owing to poverty. Richard Hellie, ''Slavery in Russia, 1450-1725'' (1984) They worked predominantly as household servants, among the richest families, and indeed generally produced less than they consumed. 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. 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.

Indigenous peoples of Siberia – notably the Yakuts and the Buryats of Eastern Siberia – practised slavery on a smaller scale. With the conquest of Siberia in the 16th and 17th centuries, the Russians enslaved natives in military operations and in Cossack raids. Cases involving native women were frequent, held as concubines, sometimes mortgaged to other men and traded for commercial profit. The Russian government generally opposed the conversion of natives to Christianity because it would free them from paying the '' yasak'', the fur tribute. The government decreed that the non-Christian slaves were to be freed. This in turn led local Russian owners of slaves to petition the government for conversion and even involved forced conversions of their slaves. The rules stipulated that the native convert became a serf of the converter. 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".

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

Current situation

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.

Recent (2009–2012) reports have identified human trafficking and slavery of Uzbek nationals in contemporary Russian society.

See also

References

{{Russia topics
Economic history of Russia
Legal history of Russia
Russia
Social history of Russia
Slavery in Europe
Slavery in Asia
Human rights abuses in Russia