History of the Slavs: from Free Peoples to Enslaved Nations
(8th century CE – late 20th century)

Beginnings – peoples between rivers and empires
The first references to the Slavs appear in Byzantine and Arab writings from the 6th–7th centuries CE. They describe decentralized farming and trading communities stretching between the Oder, Dnieper, and Danube rivers—peoples without a single state structure, which made them an easy target for stronger neighbours.
From the 8th to the 11th century Slavic captives were sold on markets across the Mediterranean world. The Latin Sclavus and the English slave share the same root – the name of these peoples. Arab and Byzantine chroniclers wrote that Sakaliba (the Slavs) were traded in Córdoba and Baghdad, with Venetian and Jewish merchants acting as intermediaries between Kyiv, Prague, Kraków and the south. It was the first large‑scale European slave route running from north to south.

Western worlds – Slavs under Germans and Franks
After the collapse of the Carolingian Empire and the German expansion eastward (the Slavica March, Saxon missions, and northern crusades), many Western Slavs – Obotrites, Veleti, Stodorans – were conquered or absorbed into the feudal structures of Germany and Bohemia. Slavic women and children appeared on the markets of Hamburg, Magdeburg, and Regensburg. This was the second, “Germanic,” route – from the areas of the Elbe and Oder toward western Europe.

Kievan Rus’ and the invasions from the East
In the east, between the 13th and 14th centuries, after the Mongol‑Tatar invasions, the principalities of Rus’ entered the tributary system of the Golden Horde. This was a miniature of the later Empire of Compulsion: a society subordinate to centralized tribute and violence. When Moscow began to replace the Horde as the dominant power, it adopted their model of authority.
Ivan IV (“the Terrible”) gave it a mystical dimension: in his vision all subjects were “the tsar’s slaves” (rab gosudarev). Any disobedience was a sin. Fear became a state instrument. From the 16th century onward the Slavs living within Muscovy and northeastern Rus’ existed in institutionalized state bondage.

The age of serfdom and the eastern empire
From the 17th to the 19th centuries – in Russia, Ukraine, Lithuania, Poland, Austria and the Balkans – the serfdom system encompassed more than half of the Slavic population: about 40 % in Russia, around 30 % in Galicia and the Balkans. Peasants deprived of personal freedom and sold with the land formed the economic core of the empires. Nineteenth‑century reforms brought legal release but not economic emancipation; dependence on the state continued.

From tsardom to the USSR – continuity of the Empire of Compulsion
After the revolutions of the 20th century the Slavs again found themselves within a system of coercion. People in Russia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Ukraine, or Bulgaria lived in states that called themselves “free” but functioned like closed colonies. Citizens could neither travel abroad nor speak openly nor work outside the state sector. In the Stalinist period millions were imprisoned in labour camps, deported, or placed under administrative control. The history of the Slavs had come full circle: state servitude replaced serfdom.

The Iron Curtain
After 1945 most Slavic nations (except Yugoslavia) were incorporated into a bloc of states subordinate to Moscow. In Poland, Czechoslovakia, the GDR, Bulgaria, and Ukraine speech, travel, and private life were subject to state control. Roughly 170 million people – over half of all Slavs – lived in a system that used the language of freedom while practicing governance through fear.

Free for the second time
Only after the disintegration of the Soviet bloc (1989–1991) did the Slavic nations truly regain autonomy. For the first time in modern history the entire region existed outside structural bondage. One generation has passed since then – the first to breathe freely after a millennium of servitude.

Estimated number of dependent Slavs in different epochs
 Period   Estimated Slavic population (million)   Enslaved or dependent (million)   Share of population   Main sources 
 8th – 11th centuries – Slavic slave trade   5 – 8   0.5 – 1   10 – 15 %   Arab and Byzantine chronicles 
 16th – 18th centuries – serfdom and Tatar raids   30 – 40   12 – 15   30 – 40 %   Davies, Hosking, Cambridge Economic History of Europe 
 19th century – Russian Empire   60 – 70   ≈ 25   35 – 40 %   Conquest, de Madariaga 
 USSR and Eastern Bloc (1917–1989)   200 – 250   150 – 170   60 – 70 %   Applebaum, Davies, UNESCO Population Studies 
This narrative shows that for the Slavs, servitude was not a historical episode but a persistent condition. From the time when their name became the very word “slave,” to the years when half of Europe lived behind barbed wire and political orthodoxy, their story illustrates how dependency mutated but never entirely disappeared. Only the collapse of the USSR opened a second breath of freedom – the true light of the lantern after a millennium of shadow.