Industrialization

Even if the law was nominally designed to keep Russians from leaving the empire, the imperial government contributed enormously to emigration in the 1800s, pushing people indirectly to leave the state it ruled. The imperial push for industrialization simultaneously created new channels of mobility and incentivized people to use them. The expansion of railway networks, supported by the state, made relocation to a new country technologically and financially possible for more and more Russians, including peasants, as time wore on.[1] Accordingly, in many cases, migration routes followed train routes—between 1890 and 1910, fully 70 percent of Russian migrants exited the Empire via Hamburg, a city connected to Russia by direct rail line.[2]

But economic development did not merely support new physical channels of emigration; the state’s inexpert response to the social disruption of industrialization also created grievances that led many to emigrate. In particular, inadequate provision for Russian serfs post-emancipation and the dismantling of the traditional agrarian economy and fueled emigration in the second half of the nineteenth century. Many peasants remained disgruntled by the staggeringly inequality of land distribution after emancipation.[3] Moreover, the 1906 Stolypin land reform allowed peasants to convert what little commune land they did have into private titles and sell them. Combined with the peasants’ lack of a meaningful stake in the post-1861 economy, this anti-collectivist reform reduced the cost of emigration and contributed to mass relocation toward the end of the imperial regime.[4][5]