page_title: Slavery
section_title: Russia
hierarchical_section_title: Slavery / History / Middle Ages / Europe / Russia
caption_attribution_description: English: Recovery of Tartar captives
context_page_description: Slavery and enslavement are the state and condition of being a slave. A person is enslaved when a slaver, by means of physical restraint or threat, has forced, coerced, or intimidated him or her into unwilling work. In chattel slavery, the enslaved person is legally rendered the personal property of the slave owner. In economics, the term de facto slavery describes the conditions of unfree labour and forced labour, where people are forced or compelled to work against their will. In the course of human history, slavery was often a feature of civilisation and legal in most societies, but is now outlawed in most countries of the world.
  In 2019, approximately 40 million people, of whom 26 percent were children, were enslaved throughout the world. In the modern world, more than 50 percent of enslaved people provide forced labor, usually in the factories and sweatshops of the private sector of a country's economy. In the industrialised countries, human trafficking is the modern variety of slavery; in the unindustrialised countries, enslavement by debt bondage is a common form of enslaving a person, such as captive domestic servants, forced marriage, and child soldiers.
context_section_description: In Kievan Rus and Muscovy, slaves were usually classified as kholops. According to David P. Forsythe, "In 1649 up to three-quarters of Muscovy's peasants, or 13 to 14 million people, were serfs whose material lives were barely distinguishable from slaves. Perhaps another 1.5 million were formally enslaved, with Russian slaves serving Russian masters." Slavery remained a major institution in Russia until 1723, when Peter the Great converted the household slaves into house serfs. Russian agricultural slaves were formally converted into serfs earlier in 1679.
caption: Crimean Tatar raiders enslaved more than 1 million Eastern Europeans.[119]
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