June 06, 2023

Welcome To Modern Slavery


Welcome To Modern Slavery
A shot from the film "Produkty 24" Metrafilms

Russia ranked eighth in the world for the prevalence of modern slavery, according to the Global Slavery Index. Which says that, in Russia, there are 13 persons in a state of slavery for every 1,000. That means about 1.9 million people in Russia live in conditions of slavery (among about 50 million in the world).

According to the rating, the situations in North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Tajikistan, and the UAE are worse than in Russia. And ranked just below Russia are Afghanistan and Kuwait.

"Modern slavery" is defined as any exploitation that a person cannot avoid due to threats, violence, coercion, deception, or abuse of power. This includes forced labor (sexual exploitation, domestic servitude, and the worst forms of child labor), human trafficking, and slavery-like practices (forced marriages, debt bondage, and child soldiers).

DOXA and the Russian fund Bezopasny Dom report that the real number of persons subjected to such slavery in Russia likely exceeds 1.9 million. "There are more and more victims," the fund said, "because the possibilities of systematic work to prevent and solve the problem are extremely limited, and the number of vulnerable groups is growing."

Representatives of Bezopasnij Dom say that there are no statistics on certain forms of exploitation in the country, but most cases in the world account for sex trafficking and forced labor.

One of Russia's most recently revealed cases of forced labor happened in Moscow, in Golyanovo. The victims were citizens of Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Tajikistan, mostly women, who for several years were forced to live in a grocery store and work for free. They were subjected to forced labor, sexual exploitation, and ill-treatment. Their plight inspired Michael Borodin’s film "Produkty 24."

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Life Stories
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Life Stories

The Life Stories collection is a nice introduction to contemporary Russian fiction: many of the 19 authors featured here have won major Russian literary prizes and/or become bestsellers. These are life-affirming stories of love, family, hope, rebirth, mystery and imagination, masterfully translated by some of the best Russian-English translators working today. The selections reassert the power of Russian literature to affect readers of all cultures in profound and lasting ways. Best of all, 100% of the profits from the sale of this book are going to benefit Russian hospice—not-for-profit care for fellow human beings who are nearing the end of their own life stories.

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This gripping autobiography plays out against the backdrop of Russia's bloody Civil War, and was one of the first Western eyewitness accounts of life in post-revolutionary Russia. Marooned in Moscow provides a fascinating account of one woman's entry into war-torn Russia in early 1920, first-person impressions of many in the top Soviet leadership, and accounts of the author's increasingly dangerous work as a journalist and spy, to say nothing of her work on behalf of prisoners, her two arrests, and her eventual ten-month-long imprisonment, including in the infamous Lubyanka prison. It is a veritable encyclopedia of life in Russia in the early 1920s.

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This compact volume is an introduction to the works of Chekhov the master storyteller, via nine stories spanning the last twenty years of his life.

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Our edition of The Little Golden Calf, one of the greatest Russian satires ever, is the first new translation of this classic novel in nearly fifty years. It is also the first unabridged, uncensored English translation ever, and is 100% true to the original 1931 serial publication in the Russian journal 30 Dnei. Anne O. Fisher’s translation is copiously annotated, and includes an introduction by Alexandra Ilf, the daughter of one of the book’s two co-authors.

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