Immigrants from Russia

History -

Immigration - Large-scale emigration from Russia to the United States only began in the late nineteenth century. The reasons for emigration included economic hardship, political repression, religious discrimination, or a combination of those factors. Between 1881 and 1914, over 3.2 million immigrants arrived from the Russian Empire. Nearly half were Jews; only 65,000 were ethnically Russian, while the remaining immigrants were Belarusans and Ukrainians. Regardless of their ethnoreligious background, their primary motive was to improve their economic status. Many of the 1.6 million Jews who also left did so because they feared pogroms —attacks on Jewish property and persons that occurred sporadically in the Russian Empire from the 1880s through the first decade of the twentieth century. (Source)