CG

Saved from slavery on October 30, civil activists Oleg Melnikov and Danila Medvedev carried out an operation to free slaves in the Product store in Moscow. For 10 years in the basement of the store, its owners held 15 citizens of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. Mitya Aleshkovsky, photographer, eyewitness and participant in events:

Each time visiting Auchan or metro, I think that if the Lord wanted to send me to hell, after death, then the most painful punishment would be as a cashier in the store. A monotonous pican of goods conducted through the cash desk, and gray people who do not know any worries that go through you, like through an arch, to exit, with their purchases. And, if you are an ordinary seller, then you sit so the whole shift, eight, for example, working hours. But the peculiarity of hell is that it is impossible to get out and escape from it, and you have to sit eternity, until one of the angels descends and takes you. And if you add to this that after completing the working day, and not having the opportunity to leave, you go behind the wall, you lay out a piece of foam rubber, and you sleep on it, then your master comes, and it beats you for some offenses, well, say, you didn’t give the buyer so-instead of large bills-small ones, and you must always keep them a lot at the box office. He hits you, hits, breaks your fingers with an iron wrench, so that you become crooked. If you are a woman, then you are raped - not a master, so his brother, not a brother, so a matchmaker. And a child is born from you after nine months, and they take it right in the hospital, or, worse, because it will be harder to part, they send to live with you on a piece of steaming, behind the wall of the store, and then they still take away and take it away in an unknown direction. Then, the news comes that the child died, somewhere in Kazakhstan, or the bull began to boil and lifted it, or he fell from the shelf, or completely died of a heart attack, in his two to three years with a bid. You endure it all, tolerate, and then you decide. Cutting a convenient moment when the owner of your personal hell has turned away, absent or busy, you quickly run away, break away, rush where you look, run lost, because you don’t know anything around, have never been here, have never seen anything, all hope for people who seem to be supported. And they find you very quickly, because you are not at all like everyone else, and you look different, and you can say in another language. They put them in the car and promise that everything will be fine, they will take it home, they only take you there, to your little store hell, to your boss who hits you, hits, hits, hits, for an attempt to escape. And you are curled up with a kalachik somewhere inside yourself and having already reconciled with your fate, you continue to monotonously sell chocolates with soda, without any hope that it is freedom, it is somewhere at all. And, suddenly, people unfamiliar to you burst and take you out into the street. For the first time, for many years, you can freely and calmly go outside and no one will drag you back. Or drag? The same police officers who had recently passed you to the owner, fourteen o'clock do not want to accept a statement that you were kept in the locality for a long time, beaten and took away the children. Other employees, and the devil will figure them out how many of their types, do not want to qualify this matter as slavery, but want illegal imprisonment. Everyone runs around, worry, you give out an interview, you live with people who have saved you, eat, drink, you will dress normally for the first time, look at the city in which there were ten years, but there was nothing but the store’s counter. And even some hope appears? And it doesn’t even matter that only those who saved you support you. It doesn’t matter that for the locals you are still nobody. It doesn’t matter that in the Internet far from you, his regulars can meanly doubt the sincerity of your story, to take the phrase “Liberation of slaves” in quotation marks. You are free! After all, yes? And you are going to understand, all to the same employees, employees, employees. And the second employees, the employees that the structures that, having caused the first, are the structures that are below, the very ones who handed over you to the boss, they are stirring up from the case, and the latter are trying to start a case on illegal migration, in fact, equalizing ten years of slavery, at ten years of illegal migration, and want to send you back home, but without returning you dignity without compensating for the entire moral and compensating for the entire moral and Physical damage, but simply throw you out like an unnecessary rubbish, and solve not yours, but your problems. And, with horror, you understand that in order to remain a person, you need to stay in hell and continue to fight for yourself, even if you have taken away in memory of the child and whom you will never see again. Maybe only in paradise, in the present, in which the Lord should definitely send you after such hell.