Russians in Crimea

Russians are the largest ethnic minority in Ukraine. This community forms the largest single Russian community outside of Russia in the world. In the 2001 Ukrainian census, 8,334,100 identified as ethnic Russians (17.3% of the population of Ukraine); this is the combined figure for persons originating from outside of Ukraine and the Ukrainian-born population declaring Russian ethnicity.

Geography

Ethnic Russians live throughout Ukraine. They comprise a notable fraction of the overall population in the east and south, a significant minority in the center, and a smaller minority in the west.

The west and the center of the country feature a higher percentage of Russians in cities and industrial centers and much smaller percentage in the overwhelmingly Ukrainophone rural areas. Due to the concentration of the Russians in the cities, as well as for historic reasons, most of the largest cities in the center and the south-east of the country (including Kyiv where Russians amount to 13.1% of the population) remained largely Russophone .

Russians constitute the majority in Crimea (71.7% in Sevastopol and 58.5% in the Autonomous republic of Crimea), the southern peninsula which the Soviet government transferred from the Russian SFSR to the Ukrainian SSR in 1954.

Outside of Crimea, Russians are the largest ethnic group in Donetsk (48.2%) and Makiyivka (50.8%) in Donetsk Oblast, Ternivka (52.9%) in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, Krasnodon (63.3%) and Sverdlovsk (58.7%) and Krasnodonskyi raion (51.7%) and Stanychno-Luhanskyi (61.1%) raion in Luhansk Oblast, Reni (70.54%) and Izmail (43.7%) in Odessa oblast, Putyvl Raion (51.6%) in Sumy Oblast.

History

Early history

One of the most prominent Russians in Medieval Ukraine (at that time the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth) was Ivan Fyodorov, who published the Ostrog Bible and called himself a Muscovite.

In 1599, Tsar Boris Godunov ordered the construction of Tsareborisov on the banks of Oskol River, the first city and the first fortress in Eastern Ukraine. To defend the territory from Tatar raids the Russians built the Belgorod defensive line (1635–1658), and Ukrainians started fleeing to be under its defense.

More Russian speakers appeared in northern, central and eastern Ukrainian territories during the late 17th century, following the Cossack Rebellion led by Bohdan Khmelnytsky. The Uprising led to a massive movement of Ukrainian settlers to the Sloboda Ukraine region, which converted it from a sparsely inhabited frontier area to one of the major populated regions of the Tsardom of Russia. Following the Treaty of Pereyaslav, Ukrainian Cossacks lands, including the modern northern and eastern parts of Ukraine, became a protectorate of the Tsardom of Russia. This brought the first significant, but still small, wave of Russian settlers into central Ukraine (primarily several thousand soldiers stationed in garrisons,Encyclopedia of Ukraine, Slobidska Ukrain
Retrieved
December 14, 2007 out of a population of approximately 1.2 million non-Russians).

At the end of the 18th century, the Russian Empire captured large uninhabited steppe territories from the former Crimean Khanate. The systematic colonization of lands in what became known as Novorossiya (mainly Crimea, Taurida and around Odessa) began. Migrants from many ethnic groups (predominantly Ukrainians and Russians from Russia proper) came to the area. At the same time, the discovery of coal in the Donets Basin also marked the commencement of a large-scale industrialization and an influx of workers from other parts of the Russian Empire.

Nearly all of the major cities of southern and eastern Ukraine were established in this period: Aleksandrovsk (now Zaporizhia; 1770), Yekaterinoslav (now Dnipro; 1776), Kherson and Mariupol (1778), Sevastopol (1783), Simferopol and Novoaleksandrovka ( Melitopol) (1784), Nikolayev (Mykolaiv; 1789), Odessa (1794), Lugansk (Luhansk; foundation of Luhansk plant in 1795).

Both Russians and Ukrainians made up the bulk of the migrants – 31.8% and 42.0% respectively. The population of Novorossiya eventually became intermixed, and with Russification being the state policy, the Russian identity dominated in mixed families and communities. The Russian Empire officially regarded Ukrainians, Russians and Belarusians as Little, Great and White Russians, which, according to the theory officially accepted in the Imperial Russia, belonged to a single Russian nation, the descendants of the people of Kievan Rus.

In the beginning of the 20th century, Russians were the largest ethnic group in the following cities: Kiev (54.2%), Kharkov (63.1%), Odessa (49.09%), Mykolaiv (66.33%), Mariupol (63.22%), Lugansk (68.16%), Berdyansk (66.05%), Kherson (47.21%), Melitopol (42.8%), Yekaterinoslav (41.78%), Kropyvnytskyi (34.64%), Pavlohrad (34.36%), Simferopol (45.64%), Feodosiya (46.84%), Yalta (66.17%), Kerch (57.8%), Sevastopol (63.46%), Chuhuiv (86%).Дністрянський М.С. Етнополітична географія України. Лівів. Літопис, видавництво ЛНУ імені Івана Франка, 2006, page 342

Russian Civil War in Ukraine

The first Russian Empire Census, conducted in 1897, showed extensive usage (and in some cases dominance) of the Little Russian, a contemporary term for the Ukrainian language, in the nine south-western Governorates and Kuban. Thus, when the Central Rada officials were outlining the future borders of the new Ukrainian state they took the results of the census in regards to the language and religion as determining factors. The ethnographic borders of Ukraine thus turned out to be almost twice as large as the original Bohdan Khmelnytsky State incorporated into the Russian Empire during the 17-18th centuries.

During World War I, a strong national movement managed to obtain some autonomous rights from the Russian government in Saint Petersburg. However, the October Revolution brought big changes for the new Russian Republic. Ukraine became a battleground between the two main Russian war factions during the Russian Civil War (1918–1922), the Communist Reds (Red Army) and the Anti-Bolshevik Whites (Volunteer Army).

The October Revolution also found its echo amongst the extensive working class, and several Soviet Republics were formed by the Bolsheviks in Ukraine: the Ukrainian People's Socialist Republic, Soviet Socialist Republic of Taurida, Odessa Soviet Republic and the Donetsk-Krivoy Rog Republic.

The Russian SFSR government supported military intervention against the Ukrainian People's Republic, which at different periods controlled most of the territory of present-day Ukraine with the exception of Crimea and Western Ukraine. Although there were differences between Ukrainian Bolsheviks initially, which resulted in the proclamation of several Soviet Republics in 1917, later, due in large part to pressure from Vladimir Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders, one Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic was proclaimed.

The Ukrainian SSR was ''de jure'' a separate state until the formation of the USSR in 1922 and survived until the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. Lenin insisted that ignoring the national question in Ukraine would endanger the support of the Revolution among the Ukrainian population and thus new borders of Soviet Ukraine were established to the extent that the Ukrainian People's Republic was claiming in 1918. The new borders completely included Novorossiya (including the short-lived Donetsk-Krivoy Rog Soviet Republic) and other neighboring provinces, which contained a substantial number of ethnic Russians.

Ukrainization in Early Soviet times

In his 1923 speech devoted to the national and ethnic issues in the party and state affairs, Joseph Stalin identified several obstacles in implementing the national program of the party. Those were the "dominant-nation chauvinism", "economic and cultural inequality" of the nationalities and the "survivals of nationalism among a number of nations which have borne the heavy yoke of national oppression".

In Ukraine's case, both threats came, respectfully, from the south and the east: Novorossiya with its historically strong Russian cultural influence, and the traditional Ukrainian center and west. These considerations brought about a policy of Ukrainization, to simultaneously break the remains of the Great Russian attitude and to gain popularity among the Ukrainian population, thus recognizing their dominance of the republic. The Ukrainian language was mandatory for most jobs, and its teaching became compulsory in all schools.

By the early 1930s attitudes towards the policy of Ukrainization had changed within the Soviet leadership. In 1933 Stalin declared that local nationalism was the main threat to Soviet unity. Consequently, many changes introduced during the Ukrainization period were reversed: Russian language schools, libraries and newspapers were restored and even increased in number. Changes were brought territorially as well, forcing the Ukrainian SSR to cede some territories to the RSFSR. Thousands of ethnic Ukrainians were deported to the far east of the Soviet Union, numerous villages with Ukrainian majority were eliminated with Holodomor, while remaining Ukrainians were subjected to discrimination. During this period parents in the Ukrainian SSR could choose to send their children whose native language was not Ukrainian to schools with Russian as the primary language of instruction.

Later Soviet times

The territory of Ukraine was one of the main battlefields during World War II, and its population, including Russians, significantly decreased. The infrastructure was heavily damaged and it required human and capital resources to be rebuilt. This compounded with depopulation caused by two famines of 1931–1932 and a third in 1947 to leave the territory with a greatly reduced population. A large portion of the wave of new migrants to industrialize, integrate and Sovietize the recently acquired western Ukrainian territories were ethnic Russians who mostly settled around industrial centers and military garrisons.Терлюк І.Я. Росіяни західних областей України (1944–1996 р.р.) (Етносоціологічне дослідження). – Львів: Центр Європи, 1997.- С.25. This increased the proportion of the Russian speaking population.

Near the end of the War, the entire population of Crimean Tatars (numbering up to a quarter of a million) was expelled from their homeland in Crimea to Central Asia, under accusations of collaborations with Germans. The Crimea was repopulated by the new wave of Russian and Ukrainian settlers and the Russian proportion of the population of Crimea went up significantly (from 47.7% in 1937 to 61.6% in 1993) and the Ukrainian proportion doubled (12.8% in 1937 and 23.6% in 1993).

The Ukrainian language remained a mandatory subject of study in all Russian schools, but in many government offices preference was given to the Russian language that gave an additional impetus to the advancement of Russification. The 1979 census showed that only one third of ethnic Russians spoke the Ukrainian language fluently.

In 1954, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR