I lived and spent my childhood in a village near Tashkent, in Uzbekistan. I am 47. I have a family, with four children and wife. After the collapse of the [Soviet] Union I did not manage to get a new green passport, as there were long queues. Without a passport I was often refused things. Previously I had worked, but the enterprise was closed and they stopped paying me. Then I went to Russia. In Kazakhstan some people took us off the bus. They were camouflaged, six of them. They told us that it was a document check. They took us to a cattle-shed. It was already dark, and under the pretext of a document check they took away my passport. We ended up living in thiscattle shed. We slept on mats that we made ourselves. There was a lake there, we were forced to cut down cane and make mats from it. They then sold them. They did not allow us to go anywhere.
[There were] Perhaps 14 persons, all from different places, even Koreans.
We fished and made soup.
They beat us if we made mistakes.
[The conditions were] Very difficult. There were snakes there which bit me several times. I was there under the sun and heat for a year and a half.
[my work-day was] from sunrise until darkness. Without holiday. An old man died because of a heart attack.
[…]
The guards watched us with dogs.
[…]
No, [the people who kept us were] different nationalities. Kazakhs, Slavs, Tatars. Then their organization became weaker and we managed to escape and reach Russia by freight train. I had no documents. Because of that I could not go home. I haven’t managed to find much work here either. I just earn some money at the vegetable market, unloading fruit and vegetables. There are plenty of us with similar stories - lack of documents, lack of registration.
[…]
I heard talked that they [my former exploiters] had been burned.
*name given
Narrative credit to International Labour Organization
Original narrative found in report ‘Forced Labour in the Russian Federation Today: Irregular Migration and Trafficking in Human Beings’
