I'm not sure that a consensus of the sort you are looking for actually exists. But you might find informative Enrico Dal Lago's 2009 article "Second Slavery, Second Serfdom, and Beyond: The Atlantic Plantation System and the Eastern and Southern European Landed Estate System in Comparative Perspective, 1800–60".

Dal Lago cites most of the major figures of Early Modern Slavic Studies and provides some useful comparisons of the similaries and differences between New World Slavery (called the Atlantic Plantation System) and the "second serfdom" in Russia/Ukraine/Poland (called the European Landed Estate System), particularly in the early-to-middle 19th century.

Dal Lago frames the "European Landed Estate System" as a set of similar by not neccesarily related instituions that existed on large landed estates (sometimes called latifundia, confusingly), in the "peripheral" areas of Southern and Eastern Europe. To put it bluntly, I personally think Dal Lago overstates the similarities between widely divergent systems of unfree labor and debt used in places as different as Sicily and Slovakia.

Nevertheless, Dal Lago notices a key insight: that a large part of the incentive for the "second serfdom" was to tie peasants to the land so that large landowners could produce grain and other cash crops for export to global markets in Germany, Britain, the United States, and elsewhere. In this way, the "second serfdom" was part of global economic system of commodities whose production was made possible through the massive use of unfree labor.

The thesis stated above is not entirely uncontroversial. Some Marxist historians still insist that the "second serfdom" was essentially a "re-feudalization", with the rise of autocratic governments and large magnates dominating rural political and economic affairs snuffing out an emerging urban proto-industrializtion. The notion of "re-feudalization" was best-developed by Polish historians in the 1960s and 1970s. Probably the best synthesis of this school of thought is Witold Kula's An Economic Theory of the Feudal System: Towards a Model of the Polish Economy, 1500–1800. This "re-feudalization" model tends to assume local-oriented forms of economic activity that are not entirely compatible with the "unfree global commodities production" model explained above.

This re-feudaliztion model has not held up very well under newer historiography regarding the idea of "feudalism", but it does have some important points that make the comparative model of Wallerstein somewhat problematic. One key problem with the "unfree commodities production" thesis above is that many of the political, legal, and social changes that enable a re-expansion of serfdom in Eastern Europe appear a good century or two before we see early modern commodities markets develop. Additionally, we see these legal and social changes even in areas like Royal Hungary that don't appreciably participate in large-scale commodities production until well into the 19th century.

One interpretation of this contradiction is that there never was a "second" serfdom, only a continuation of Late Medieval forms of serfdom in Eastern Europe beyond the 14th century, by which point those forms of land-labor relations had gradually become defunct in Northern and Western Europe. Under this "one serfdom" model, the persistence of serfdom in Eastern Europe into the sixteenth century enabled the creation of large estates producing commodities (chiefly grains like wheat, rye, and barley) for export to markets in Germany and the Low Countries. This model is most popular with modern Central European scholars, and there isn't a single comprehensive work of synthesis in English the discusses it in detail, although Wandycz's The Price of Freedom: A History of East Central Europe from the Middle Ages to the Present, comes pretty darn close.

Wow, that turned out to be more comprehensive than I expected. I guess I learned something in college after all. I'll fix the typos later, but I hope this provides a half-way decent introduction to the last few decades of historiography on the economic and political development of Eastern Europe.

EDIT: Typos, spelling(!), confusing historians with movie directors, etc.