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
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