In Russia, moreover, it's arguable that slavery at least originated as much out of philanthropic motives as the desire to pin down mobile labor. I know this is a controversial theory (although I believe it is not that controversial), but it seems to me logical that if there was a surplus of labor, as there seems to have been in early medieval Russia, that noble households would take on the responsibility of maintaining an unnecessary labor force for the sole purpose of staving off greater social problems. You could see this same motivation even behind many of the wealthier noble households in the nineteenth and early twentieth century - Westerners often commented about how in Russia there were always six servants sitting around on the off chance of being available to open a door, whereas one person could have done the job just as well or better.
One of the reasons there was a surfeit of labor in Russia was that such a large portion of the population was bound to the land, especially in a country where, due to climate, agricultural and husbandry work consumed less of the year than in much of Europe. And, being bound to the land, they were unable to engage in other activity that would give them the wherewithal to fuel the growth of what we today call a consumer economy.
In fact, much the history of tsarist Russia (whether the expansion of serfdom with Peter I and Catherine II, or the establishment of the Pales of Settlement under Catherine II and the May Laws under Alexander III) was built on policies that had as their purpose
limiting the abilities of large portions of the population to participate in economic activity that would expand wealth, and consequently expand the ability to purchase goods, and consequently create demand for labor to manufacture and distribute those goods.
Yes, highly-advanced nations suffer periodic bouts of high unemployment. But that is a relative term, with high unemployment in the west often being defined as something above 6%. True systemic, massive, and prolonged surpluses of labor are the hallmark of poor, underdeveloped countries, not developed or developing countries. (For example, in parts of India, grass on estates is kept short by lines of people who crawl across lawns tearing grass by hand, because using a dozen such laborers is cheaper than buying a lawnmower.)
Granted, Europe had one advantage (though I wince to call it that) over Russia in this arena. The plagues of the medieval period that swept over Europe but largely spared Muscovy -- killing as much as 70% of the English population -- vastly reduced the supply of labor and dislodged the hold serfdom had over many European feudal societies. So perhaps Europe's modern economy was in a sense jump started by the horrors of plague more than by sound government economic policy. (I'm never one to discount the role of pure chance in history.)
But the fact is that Russia kept itself saddled with a surplus labor supply by pursuing state policies that restricted the range of economic activity in which vast majorities of people could engage, thereby ultimately restricting demand for goods.
Basically, the argument that Russia created and maintained serfdom and other forms of servile status in order to deal with unemployment is an argument that Russia chose to keep itself economically under-developed and to keep wealth concentrated in as few hands as possible. If they can get by with the argument that they did it out of the goodness of their hearts, more power to them.
