After 1917, under the influence of new social conditions, the beginning of industrialization in the USSR and the policy of development of the outskirts, a new type of migration emerged, entitled in official documents of that time as “relocating workers to remote areas”. The systematization of legislative regulation of this type of migration in the absence of well-established statistical accounting is the purpose of the study, the results of which are presented in this article. The 1920s became a noticeable frontier in the long history of Russia’s settlement of the eastern regions, but the costly practice of attracting specialists, developed in the mid-1920s in the framework of the departmental approach, cannot be considered effective from the point of view of the formation of a stable population in these areas.