Legal Controls on Mobility

Since the codification of the Ulozhenie in 1649, the Russian Empire had imposed a great number of legal limits on the mobility of its population. Townspeople and peasants were technically bound to their places of residence and could not leave without official documentation.[1] Even after emancipation in 1861, peasants remained tied to their land by a variety of legal constraints.[2] The state required individuals to hold foreign passports to cross the border; the cost of these passports made emigrating directly from Russian ports prohibitively expensive for many.[3] Mary Antin, a Jewish woman who fled the Empire in 1891, wrote that without an official passport, she and her family would have had to “steal across the border” to successfully complete their journey to Germany.[4] Restrictive passport rules created a barrier to emigration, one that posed an obstacle to families like Antin’s.

In practice, however, the imperial government appears to have been more accommodating than policy would suggest. This reality was partly geographic—the Empire’s long borders were difficult to patrol effectively.[5] Instead of punishing migrants post hoc, tsars up to and including Alexander I used decrees of amnesty to woo migrants back from foreign shores,[6] coaxing rather than coercing its former peoples to return. The state eventually gave up the semblance of rigidity in its policy—as of 1892, emigration was officially legal under Russian law, though emigrants renounced their right to return.[7]