Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko decided to stand in the way of population migration from villages to cities and forbid peasants to leave their properties.
Lukashenko announced that he would pass a law that would prohibit peasants and rural workers from doing their jobs in the countryside and that they would not be allowed to move to the cities.
"Yesterday, a decree arrived on my desk that concerns, simply speaking, serfdom. That decree would increase the power of regional governors and teach peasants to be much more efficient," Lukashenko said, reports Gazeta.ru.
According to him, governors who failed to ensure timely sowing or harvesting would be fired.
Before entering politics, the Belarusian president was the deputy chairman of collective agriculture in the USSR. Belarus normally produces huge quantities of potatoes, grain and livestock, but farming methods have not changed since Soviet times.
Low wages and poor prospects for progress in agriculture forced many peasants to seek a better future in the cities or in neighboring Russia.
Serfdom was abolished in Imperial Russia by Emperor Alexander II in 1861, but during the Soviet era, it was restored again, only under a different name and system. Workers in the USSR were tied to a specific country and travel restrictions were imposed on them.
If Lukashenko signs the new decree, Belarus will violate the international convention on the abolition of forced labor from 1957, to which it is a signatory. This, however, did not prevent him from signing a similar decree in 2012 that referred to employees in the wood industry.
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