Conclusion

While Imperial Russia started the century by actively encouraging its citizens to remain within its borders, promising amnesty and special privileges to emigrants who returned, by 1900 the government was inarguably and decisively pushing people away. The state’s nominally restrictive rules on mobility were in practice laxly enforced, and the state eventually created a structure for legal emigration. Moreover, through socially disruptive economic reforms and persecution of the Jewish population, the tsarist government actively precipitated widespread emigration from the Empire in the mid- and late nineteenth century.