During the years 1940-1945, Soviet laborers, including free laborers, were subject to increased coercion. Two new categories of forced laborers appeared : the « labor soldiers » and the POWs. They added to the categories already present in the 1930s : the concentration camp prisoners and the « special settlers ». The aim of this article is to describe precisely the situation of free and unfree laborers, in so far as the quality of the documents allows it. It attempts to depict their economic and social conditions, however diverse their juridical statuses may have been. I seek to explain the weakness of social protest in the URSS which is impossible to explain merely by repression, even though repression was very violent. This lack of protest was also the product of the inner divisions of the labor force, and particularly of the coexistence of free and unfree laborers. The segmentation of Soviet laborers hindered any united protest action : social protest existed, but it was partitioned. It is difficult to define free labor in Soviet society, where peasants considered their work in the kolkhoz as a « second serfdom ». Recent research on other societies has shown that the boundary between free labor and forced labor was not self-evident and varied in time and space. In the USSR, during World War II, free wage-earners who violated labor discipline incurred penal sanctions, but this fact did not mean there were no differences between free labor and forced labor in its various forms, which were managed by the political police. These various forms were not separated by clear boundaries, but overlapped, with almost imperceptible transitions.