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
Latvians in Russia make up approximately 300 out of almost 2000 inhabitants of the municipality. In Siberia (modern Krasnoyarsk Krai), the village () was founded by Latvian settlers in 1859. The village still exists and has less than one hundred inhabitants. Since the 1990s, there is a number of Latvian organizations and Latvian Lutheran parishes in Russia, primarily in major cities such as Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Omsk, Tomsk, Smolensk and others. Latvians in Russia Latvians in Russia are a small ethnic minority scattered across various regions of Russia. According to the 2010 census, 18,979 people in Russia identified themselves as ethnic Latvians, down