The Politics of Unfree Labour in Russia by Buckley Mary

Author:Buckley, Mary
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2017-11-30T05:00:00+00:00

Yaroslavl, 2014

How did responses in 2014 in Yaroslavl compare to those in Moscow? Participants more readily came up with the topic of women and girls leaving Russia for work. A 27-year-old male technical worker remembered friends who had worked as a waitress and as a cook leaving for jobs elsewhere. He described an outflow of ‘professions with these lower qualifications’. Only ‘from media sources’, however, had he heard of cases of forced prostitution. An unemployed 56-year-old-male bodyguard quickly interjected with ‘yes, and it is going on now’. When asked if he meant within Russia, he came back with ‘no, why? They go abroad and for good. There are no documents – no person.’ He quickly claimed he had no personal links to this world but had learnt about it ‘from the television’.

Others were asked what they knew. A 30-year-old woman in medicine said, ‘yes, I probably remember’, adding it was all about ‘criminality’ and ‘slavery’ (rabstvo). Another voice repeated ‘slavery’, and the bodyguard used the term ‘swindling’ or ‘cheating’ (moshennichestvo). Another thought that people travelled on their own, but the bodyguard disagreed with ‘in so far as I know, they collect groups’. The moderator enquired what those who gathered the groups were called, and a 45-year-old factory worker said, ‘tricksters’ (aferisty) and then a ‘psychologist’. The moderator corrected him with ‘well probably a psychologist inside, but what is he?’ Once more the unemployed bodyguard who seemed conversant with this topic finally said ‘a middleman’ (posrednik). He was the only participant in all four groups to volunteer this word.

As in the group in Moscow, no one readily came up with the term ‘trafficker’ or the process of ‘human trafficking’. Pressed again to think further, the technical worker offered ‘banditry, terrorism – whatever’. A 20-year-old female law student suggested ‘a foolish gamble’ (lokhotron).17 Finally, a 47-year-old female post-office worker was led into saying that there was ‘trade’ and ‘in people’. When the entire group was asked if members had heard the term ‘torgovlia liud'mi’ or ‘human trafficking’, they found it easier, like participants in the other groups, to respond in terms of concrete examples rather than by discussing the concept. The law student knew about the process from the Internet and imparted: ‘they collect girls and send them to Europe, for example. They work there. They sell them.’ Then, ‘either they kill them there, or lock them up somewhere and they don't often return to their homeland’. She went on that they were used ‘with force’ and made to work in prostitution. The young male technician also said he knew about this ‘and not from the television’. When pressed for his source, he said ‘from one of my acquaintances’.

The tale that unfolded was an illustration of the trafficking of male labour within Russia. He put it like this:

They offered a man good work in some sort of construction project in Moscow oblast. He went and was met by armed men who took his passport and took him to a wooded area. It was overgrown there, no one was nearby and they set them all to work.

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