Labor Emigration from Tsarist Russia: A Review Essay

Abstract

Immigrants from Tsarist Russia became a factor in economic development at die end of the 1890s, constituting important part of die New Immigration. Since the participants in this wave tended to be men between the ages of 20 and 45, the loss of this most dynamic element of the work force, not to mention potential military personnel, evoked loud complaints at home. Accordingly, emigration history has become area of growing research interest for Soviet historians. As a first attempt to produce overall understanding of the process of economic emigration to Europe and the United States before World War I, N.L. Tudorianu's (1986) study, Outline of Russian Economic Emigration in the Period of Imperialism, should be of interest to Americans in terms of both fact and interpretation. Because die work was published in Kishinev in edition of just 1,125 copies, it is probably hard to find in libraries, and therefore extended summary of the work would seem to be in order. Tudorianu's operating assumptions place his work firmly in the context of Soviet historiography and its purposes. As he put it, his study contributes to the general study of capitalism and to the study of the mobility of tsarist society at the turn of the century. In addition, he argued, it is necessary to conduct an uncompromising struggle against ideology and to counteract the statements of bourgeois scholars, apologists of imperialism, who extol the benefits of the American way of life for the unfortunate of the world (pp. 2-3). American social-eco? nomic and social-political literature, he declared, now as in the past, in every way praises and propagandizes the way of life, traditionally describing how the persecuted, hungry and needy refugees from different countries, once in the United States, managed to enrich themselves and to acquire democratic rights and freedoms (p. 208). If Tudorianu meant to attack ahistorical attitude that fails to put the story of immigration into a worldwide context or that neglects to tell the darker side of the immigrants' life, he of course had a legitimate