Emigration has historically held a very special place in the life of Russia. Ranking ninth in the world by population size, Russia is third in terms of the number of its citizens living abroad at 11 million people, or about 7% of the population. India ranks first with 18 million emigrants, but that works out as only 1.3% of its total population.
Even more important is the dynamic of the process. From the time of Peter the Great until the late 19th century, the migration balance in the Russian Empire remained positive: more people arrived than left. Originally, these were craftsmen and settlers from advanced European countries. The government drew them to search for ore, build cities, canals, and roads, and develop the manufacturing industry, the army, and the navy.
Empress Elizabeth began inviting entire ethnic groups, guided by religious and linguistic affinity. Under her, in 1753, “New Serbia” appeared in Russia, with 16,000 colonists and soldiers, followed by compact settlements of Armenians, Greeks, Romanians, Bulgarians, and others who fled the Ottoman Empire. The next empress, Catherine the Great, continued and expanded this trend. In 1762, she issued a special Manifesto declaring that foreigners of all nations ( “except Jews” ) were “…graciously accepted for settlement in Russia, and it is hereby most solemnly affirmed that all who come to settle in Russia shall be bestowed with Our imperial favor and benevolence.”
The native Russian population, bound to the land by serfdom, participated in migration mainly through unrecorded flight to “gray zones” such as the Wild Field or Cossack territories.
After the implementation of the reform package initiated by Emperor Alexander II, beginning in the 1860s, a free labor market rapidly formed in Russia, encompassing about 22 million people—mostly young, unskilled, landless former serfs who no longer had any aspirations in the countryside. The result was, on the one hand, explosive growth of the capitalist economy, and on the other, an equally explosive rise in social problems, including migration.
By this time, the possessions of the Russian Empire had expanded significantly, and the number of ethnic conflicts had increased. These inevitably affected migration processes. After the Caucasian War, at least 400,000 (and according to some, possibly up to one million) Muslim muhajirs left the Kuban region for Turkey. Several waves of emigration of Crimean Tatars since the conquest of the peninsula resulted in a total outflow of no fewer than 200,000 people.
Overall, based on officially recorded acts of border crossings, Valerian Obolensk identified three stages of migration dynamics in Russia, starting in 1828, when the empire first introduced border crossing statistics, and up until 1915. By rounding his figures and grouping them into generalized time periods, we have obtained a simplified yet illustrative graph:
Until the early 20th century and the first Russian Revolution of 1905, the migration inflow predominated. Afterward, it was reversed. Striving for greater precision in estimates makes little sense, if only because border crossing statistics did not account for illegal ( “secret” ) migration and the numerous refugees from the Turkish, Persian, and Caucasian wars, as well as the Polish uprisings. However, according to the author, these groups likely numbered no more than several hundred thousand and therefore could not significantly alter the overall picture.
Before World War I, the rapidly growing emigration followed a rational pattern, driven primarily by economic and ethnic/religious motives. In that respect, it barely differed from the migration processes in other European countries. V. Obolensky writes that during the period from 1861 until World War I, the American continent (primarily the United States, Canada, and Argentina) absorbed three-quarters of all those who left Russia—a total of about three million people, more than two million of whom settled in the United States.
Most emigrants came from the western, Europeanized borderlands of the empire— then known as the Baltic provinces, Poland, Little Russia (Ukraine), and Belarus. About 40% of emigrants were ethnic Jews, which is understandable as a reaction to state-sponsored antisemitism and the threat of pogroms. The number of ethnic Russians among emigrants did not exceed half a million, including religious dissenters such as the Doukhobors, Molokans, and Old Believers.
The immigration flow into Russia at the time came mostly from Germany (1.5 million), Austria-Hungary (mostly Slavs—Czechs, Galicians, and Poles—about 0.9 million), and Persia (mainly Christians—Greeks and Armenians—about 0.85 million).
Things changed dramatically after 1917, when deliberate relocation was replaced by chaotic flight from famine and Bolshevik terror. At the same time, the quality of statistical records declined sharply, giving way to outright statistical propaganda. Figures ceased to reflect social reality and instead became tools for manipulating public opinion, used to “prove” the advantages of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the socialist system.
The accuracy of estimates dropped to within a margin of error of a million people, and the topic of emigration was silenced—by the early 1930s, it had become entirely forbidden. V. Obolensky (Osinsky), along with all the other subsequent directors of the Soviet Union’s statistical agency of that time—V. Milyutin, S. Minaev, I. Kraval, and I. Vermenichev—were all executed in the late 1930s. The issue of entry and exit was scrubbed from public discourse.
Despite varying estimates, in the early post-Revolution years, the outflow amounted to 2–3 million people—mostly from the “affluent classes,” that is, the best educated and skilled demographics. According to incomplete data from the American Red Cross, by late 1920, the number of refugees from Russia totaled 2,092,000, and for the first time ever, the indisputable majority of them were ethnic Russians.
Beginning in the late 1920s—with the consolidation of the totalitarian regime, the abolition of the New Economic Policy, collectivization, and the launch of Stalin’s Five-Year Plans— the borders were sealed shut, and mass-scale emigration disappeared.
The second wave of the population outflow from the USSR consisted of “non-returners” from the Great Patriotic War (World War II). This demographic included former POWs, Ostarbeiter, collaborators, and refugees who managed to shelter in Western Europe from Stalin’s harsh postwar repatriation campaign to bring “his own” people back to the USSR. More than five million were returned to the Soviet Union (in part forcibly), but about 700,000 managed to remain abroad.
After the war, the borders were re-sealed—until the third, Brezhnev-era wave of emigration, which amounted to about 0.5 million people and, unlike the previous ones, was quite protracted. Ethnicity-wise, it consisted mainly of Jews (about two-thirds), Germans (about one-fifth), and Armenians (about one-tenth).
The fourth, Gorbachev-era, or post-Soviet wave (also associated with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989) was more civilized and resembled a steady, functioning migration flow, fluctuating between 100,000 and 200,000 people per year. Initially, Germans, Jews, Armenians, and Greeks continued to predominate (ethnic motives still dominated emigration sentiment), but from the mid-to-late 1990s onward, emigrants increasingly represented a wide range of nationalities, including ethnic Russians. The process gradually returned to the natural global pattern of active people moving in search of better earnings and more comfortable living conditions.
The total volume of the post-Soviet stage is difficult to estimate due to the uneven quality of migration records in the former USSR countries, but in any case, we are talking about several million people—at least three. Over time, the intensity of outflow declined. By the mid-2000s, Russia’s market economy had stabilized, the quality of life improved significantly, European countries began gradually introducing restrictions on immigration, and the ethnic groups—Jewish, German, Armenian, and Greek—that had long served as the main emigration base within the CIS region, had dwindled. As a result, the process became routine and more modest in scale.
Overall, with each successive wave, emigration from Russia became increasingly legal, while the degree of administrative hostility toward those leaving declined. Under Stalin, any attempt to emigrate was treated as state treason, punishable by labor camp or execution. During the Brezhnev era, emigrants were no longer killed, but they were harassed as “traitors to the Motherland” , and their departure was burdened with specially designed bureaucratic obstacles—such as the requirement to repay the cost of their “free” higher education.
By the fourth, Gorbachev-era stage, the overt administrative barriers and ideological hysteria had largely vanished. Departures were accompanied only by occasional acts of personal hostility at the level of local officials.
The self-perception of emigrants evolved, too. The first wave of the 1920s believed it had “carried Russia away on the soles of its shoes,” expecting to return soon and thus striving to preserve and strengthen a closed diasporic world. In contrast, the non-returnees of the wartime era preferred to remain invisible, blending into their host countries as completely as possible—to stay out of harm’s way. The third and partly the fourth wave (especially in its early years) swung to the opposite extreme: they sought to “shake the dust of developed socialism off their shoes” and threw themselves with demonstrative zeal into alternative ideological projects—whether Zionist, right-wing radical, or anti-Soviet nationalist.
In any case, unlike the 19th century, the 20th century for Russia ushered in a large-scale emigration, marked by alternating bursts and freezes of the mass outflow. Each wave differed in motives, destinations, degree of legality, and cultural refinement, but all shared one constant vector—outward. Attempts by Soviet and post-Soviet authorities, using both carrot and stick, to reverse the process proved essentially futile: except for the postwar forced repatriations overseen by Colonel General F. Golikov, thousands and tens of thousands returned, but millions left.
Against this backdrop, the new, fifth, wave of emigration of the 2020s, prompted to the war in Ukraine, differs from all of its preceding counterparts, while paradoxically containing elements of them all. Interwoven and overlapping are the desperate flight from a forced mobilization drive, rational economic motives, pronounced ideological rejection of the Putin regime, the hope of quietly waiting out the war from afar, the determination to continue the struggle for Russia’s future, and the willingness to sever all ties with the homeland and fully integrate into a new society.
It is perhaps the most diverse Russian emigration ever recorded—socioculturally, demographically, and motivationally. Moreover, it has evolved over time, splitting into several sub-waves of its own.
It seems reasonable, therefore, to describe this new migratory phenomenon not with the familiar term “emigration,” but with the newer concept of “relocation” —a word that emphasizes its mobility, fluidity, and distinct new character. This concept clearly demands new methods of description and study, primarily sociological ones. The report presented here offers the most comprehensive analysis to date of Russian relocation in the Putin era.