Serfdom in Russia Great, businesses began to send serfs into those areas in an attempt to harvest their large amount of untapped natural resources Tsar Alexander I wanted to reform the system but was thwarted in this ambition. New laws allowed all classes (except the serfs) to own land, a privilege that had previously been confined to the nobility. Russian serfdom was finally abolished in the emancipation reform of 1861 by Tsar Alexander II. Scholars have proposed multiple overlapping reasons to account for the abolition, including fear of a large-scale revolt by the serfs, the government's financial needs, evolving cultural sensibilities, and 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