Crimean War defeat drove Russia’s industrialization and urban migration

Evidence

Attitudes towards Muslims and Jews proved malleable, though, and as a focus of the anxieties of Russian elites, they were hardly alone. From the 1860s, wide-ranging transformations swept across the empire. Tsarist defeat in the Crimean War (1853–56) prompted the autocracy to seek new ways to enhance its legitimacy and to strengthen the empire. A social and economic order grounded in serfdom was partially unravelled by tsarist decree. Investing in railroad construction and rapid industrialisation, the regime unleashed urbanisation and mass migration. Russia was on the move like never before. Throughout European Russia, the ranks of imperial urban centres swelled. — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 526