This book results from Mary Buckley's impressive, more than ten-year long sustained mixed-methods inquiry into the politics of human trafficking and unfree labor in Russia. Methodologically, it is based on two large-scale quantitative surveys conducted seven years apart (2007 and 2014), four focus groups (in Moscow in 2007 and 2014, Vladimir in 2007, and Yaroslavl in 2014), in-depth interviews with NGOs, researchers, and diaspora activists, as well as analysis of print and online media articles relating to human trafficking in and out of Russia. The book consists of two distinctive parts. The first is devoted to human trafficking while the second tackles the topic of labor migration in Russia. I will return to this important structural characteristic in the final part of my review.

The initial six chapters deal solely with human trafficking and present this phenomenon from different angles. Chapter 1 provides an authoritative history of the varied categories of unfree labor such as slavery, serfdom, or penal servitude (katorga). Chapter 2 tackles the politics of getting human trafficking onto legislative agendas, spearheaded by the continued mobilization around this issue by civil society and NGOs. This finally led to important legal amendments and the criminalization of human trafficking. Chapter 3 presents the fluctuating “moral panic” around the issue of human trafficking through “representative examples” (94) of articles in the mainstream print media. Chapters 3 and 4 document what and how the Russians think of human trafficking by triangulating the results of the large-scale opinion polls with the description of the focus groups’ data. The sequence of these two chapters enables the reader to see the general trends and supplement them with “thick descriptions” of the focus groups’ discussions, rich in detail and conveying the meanings, understandings, but also emotions around human trafficking. The overall image I had was that the issue of human trafficking figures rather at the margins of public consciousness, however, when invoked it provoked heated debates and emotional responses. The full picture is complemented by Chapter 6, which analyzes the interviews with human trafficking experts, demonstrating the complexity of bringing this phenomenon under a proper law enforcement scrutiny—an observation that echoes Lauren A. McCarthy's excellent book Trafficking Justice: How Russian Police Enforce New Laws, from Crime to Courtroom (Cornell, 2015).

The remaining four chapters are devoted to the analysis of the politics of unfree labor within the context of labor migration to Russia—the third largest destination for migrants globally (after the United States and Germany). Chapter 7 situates the cases of slave migrant labor within the wider trends and characteristics of contemporary labor migration to Russia. Chapter 8 deals with the policy and legislative changes concerning labor migration from 2002 until 2017, and the institutional rearrangements that accompanied them (such as the disbandment of the Federal Migration Service). Chapter 9 is devoted to expert narratives on migration, especially around the issues of migrant adaptation, migration policy changes and their impacts on the migrant population, and corruption within the migration governance sphere. Chapter 10 brings together the surveys and the focus groups illustrating how Russian attitudes toward labor migration have hardened across the 2000s: the public openly supports restrictions on new arrivals and backs deportations. These discussions very much reminded me of the ones held in the United Kingdom around “British jobs for British workers” and a tendency to “hold on to fixed stereotypes about migrants” (292). The Conclusion presents an interesting analysis of “enabled citizenship” (297) and leaves the reader with a poignant question: “what more should be done globally to make life less cheap today?” (302).

One reservation I have of this otherwise excellent and illuminating analysis is that the author potentially tried to do too much. While it was repeatedly explained that not all labor migration to Russia can be characterized as forced or bonded labor (2, 188, 198), the title of the monograph perhaps unintentionally subsumed trafficking and labor migration under the wider conceptual umbrella of unfree labor. This specific focus on “unfree labor” is not necessarily sustained in the second part of the book, where the expert analysis, opinion polls, and focus groups quite often discuss the phenomenon of labor migration per se. This casts the net of “unfree labor” far too wide and potentially contributes to a misconception that most of contemporary labor migration to Russia could be framed through the politics of unfree labor. In conclusion, I wholeheartedly recommend this book to all the students and scholars of human trafficking and migration to Russia.