Most people I talk to don’t know that 80% of Russians were slaves until their emancipation in 1861, as well as a significant amount of Ukrainians, Belarusians, Latvians and Estonians. There were no reparations paid, in fact they had to continue working for free for generations to pay bankers for the same land they have been enslaved for. Then just after the former serfs finally paid their “debt” the Bolsheviks came and took it

They took the slavery / serf distinction seriously in the Slavic world. While the distinctions might have mattered in the 1800s, by any modern-slavery standard the serfs were slaves, as you rightly say.

Whatever we might now think with hindsight of the communist revolution in Russia, if ever there was a country primed for the peasants to rise up against the ruling class, it was Russia.

Russia might have been a land of art, music, dance and literature, but you were pretty fucked if you weren't in the 20%.