Socioeconomic Change

Life under Austrian control continued to be hard for the peasants. The population began to increase, but there was no industry to give workers a livelihood. A massive exodus of young workers to the Americas began to gain momentum in the late 1800s.

In Russian-controlled Ukraine, mining operations started to draw workers to the mines and new industries. Local Ukrainian excess labor preferred to move on to other agricultural opportunities—if not in Ukraine, then further afield in the Americas. The city of Odessa blossomed as a Russian-controlled trading center on the Black Sea. These new Russian workers were the seedbed of the Russian population of Eastern Ukraine today.

The components of 21st-century Ukraine were beginning to come together.