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.
[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.
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.
[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.
[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.