From decrees of 1791 and 1794 onward, the Russian Empire required its Jewish subjects — acquired chiefly through the partitions of Poland — to live within a defined western zone, the Pale of Settlement, with exemptions for narrow categories such as merchants of the first guild, university graduates and certain artisans. The system was a legal confinement rather than a camp: it restricted where people could live, trade, own land and attend school, and was tightened by the May Laws of 1882, which barred Jews from villages within the Pale, and by quotas on secondary and higher education. Expulsions were periodically enforced, most visibly from Moscow in 1891-1892. The Pale held nearly five million people at the 1897 census and was abolished only in 1917. The atlas already covers the pogroms and emigration of the 1880s and 1890s; the residence regime that framed them is a distinct and larger confinement system.
The Russian imperial state confined its Jewish subjects to a designated western zone of residence and periodically expelled them from cities and villages within and beyond it
The 1897 census, the empire's only full one, recorded 5,189,401 Jews by religion, of whom roughly 4.9 million lived within the Pale of Settlement; they made up about 12 per cent of the Pale's population and a much higher share of its towns. At the Pale's creation in 1791 the Jewish population of the empire was on the order of one million, so the restricted population grew fivefold over the system's life.
The residence regime itself was not lethal; it operated through law, policing and expulsion orders. Deaths associated with Russian Jewry in this period arose from the pogroms of 1881-1884, 1903-1906 and the civil war, which the atlas covers in separate entries.
Imperial legislation itself, catalogued in the YIVO Encyclopedia, established the residence, education and occupational disabilities and the expulsion powers used against Jews resident outside the Pale.
Belarus, Russia