"Russian 'slave' freed by rights group after 18 years in captivity", 29 September 2014

Human rights activists have freed a Russian man who said he was held as a slave for 18 years in the North Caucasus, escaping a number of times only to be caught and handed over to different owners, a news report said. The anti-slavery rights group Alternative helped former captive Sergei Khlivnoi escape from a sheep farm in the Dagestan republic…Khlivnoi…said he was captured in 1996 when he was working for a Murmansk-based shipping company…[H]e met a group of men from Dagestan, had a few drinks with them, and woke up to find himself at a brick factory in Dagestan's port of Kaspiisk — trapped behind a barbed wire fence, surrounded by guards and without his passport. Khlivnoi escaped from the factory a few months later…but was captured by another group of Dagestani men and taken to a cattle farm in the mountains, where he was chained up at night and forced to tend to livestock during the day…Scores of reports and witness accounts in the Russian media attest to "slaves" being freed after many years of forced labor in Dagestan and other regions…