History of serfdom process, referred to as "second serfdom" or "export-led serfdom", persisted until the mid-19th century and became very repressive and substantially limited serfs' rights. Before the 1861 abolition of serfdom in Russia, a landowner's estate was often measured by the number of "souls" he owned, a practice made famous by Gogol's 1842 novel "Dead Souls". Many of these countries abolished serfdom during the Napoleonic invasions of the early 19th century. Serfdom remained in force in most of Russia until the Emancipation reform of 1861, enacted on February 19, 1861, though in the Russian-controlled Baltic provinces it had been abolished at the
Azerbaijanis in Russia the Russian Empire conquering what is now Azerbaijan in the early nineteenth century and its incorporation into the Soviet Union in 1920, the Azeri population did not tend to leave its traditional areas of settlement until the second half of the twentieth century. However, isolated communities of Azeris in Russia can trace their existence to the mid-nineteenth century. The population of maritime Caspian regions has historically had strong economic ties with the city of Astrakhan on the northern Caspian shore. Starting in the 1830, Azeri merchants began settling in this city, with three of them controlling up to 80% of