THIRTEEN years have passed since the day Vladimir Yepishin vanished. His relatives lost hope of seeing him again, his house was given away and the police stopped looking for him. Everyone thought he had died.
Last week, however, he returned home to tell of an ordeal more reminiscent of medieval times than modern Russia.
After being lured into a trap in the summer of 1989, he was abducted and taken to the breakaway republic of Chechnya by a criminal gang that sold him as a slave. He was sold on 10 times and twice passed between warlords as a “present”. Still only 49, and having lost his teeth and the sight in one eye, Yepishin looks old and broken.
“I thought that I would die there,” he said.
Yepishin was first smuggled to Ingushetia, a region neighbouring Chechnya, from Yaroslav, a town 200 miles northeast of Moscow. Two Ingush men invited him to dinner and plied him with drink. He was lured onto a train with the promise of a better job in Moscow.
“When I sobered up a bit I said I wanted to go home,” recalled Yepishin. “But they had taken away my passport.”
His first master kept him for nearly two years. He was then sold on in Chechnya, where he lived through two wars.
The worst treatment he endured was at the hands of a vicious warlord, Amin, who beat him with the butt of a Kalashnikov. “I tried to escape but was caught,” recalled Yepishin. “Amin forced me to walk with a heavy metal stove on my back. I was coughing blood.”
Nearly four years ago Ramil Gamilov, another Russian slave in Chechnya, was freed after seven years, unaware that the Soviet Union had collapsed.
According to the Russian Mothers’ Committee, some 800 Russian soldiers are being held in Chechnya. However, the Kremlin may soon disband a state commission that has tried to find and free them.
Two years ago, when the Russian campaign against Chechen rebels was at its height, Yepishin was forced on foot across mountains under attack by MiG fighter jets. He was held in Georgia’s Pankisi gorge, where American soldiers are poised to root out Islamic militants believed to be close to Al-Qaeda.
He was freed there earlier this month with the help of a Russian journalist.
“To them I was nothing,” said Yepishin. “For Chechens, having a Russian slave is a status symbol. I didn’t exist. I thought it would never end.”