Russian peasants could frequently escape serfdom by settling in the newly conquered Russian territories in Siberia and the Far East or by becoming Cossacks in the Don region and (later) in the Northern Caucasus and the Urals. Old Believers also fled to Siberia, and occasionally to Ukraine, to escape religious prosecution. The conquest of Southern Ukraine and Crimea under Catherine the Great in the late eighteenth century opened new land for settlement and contributed to the establishment of a thriving grain trade with Western Europe via the new Black Sea port of Odessa.

After Tsar Alexander II liberated the Russian serfs in 1861, the peasants lost much of their land; they now had to lease it from noble landowners. The rapid growth of the peasant population in the late nineteenth century aggravated this problem. The desire of the Russian peasants to reclaim their land from the gentry played a significant role in the Russian revolution. The Russian conquest of Central Asia in the 1860s and 1870s opened new opportunities for peasant migrants from Central Russia. Millions of Russian peasants moved to Central Asia and Siberia before the revolution. They were attracted by the government’s promise of land. However, the imperial government failed to implement appropriate mechanisms of organizational and economic support for new migrants and these new imperial conquests did not suffice to defuse social tensions.