All documents relating to the Armenian immigration make it clear that Russia, for political, military, and economic reasons, strongly encouraged the Armenians to settle in the newly-established Armenian province, especially the region of Erevan, which between 1795 and 1827 had lost some 20,000 Armenians who had immigrated to Georgia. Since few Georgian Armenians planned to return, Russia concentrated on repatriating the Armenians taken to Iran in the seventeenth century by Shah Abbas. The only major immigration into Karabakh was by the former Armenians of Karabakh who had escaped the oppression of its ruler Ebrahim Khan, some as late as the 1790s, who had sought refuge in Ganje, Georgia, and Erevan. They began returning home after a decade or so, following the Russian protectorate over Karabakh in 1805 and continued to do so until the 1820s. According to archival documents most of them returned to their own villages, which, for the most part, had remained abandoned.