History of The Russian Language in Ukraine - Russian Migration

Russian Migration

The first waves of Russian settlers onto Ukrainian territory came in the late 16th century to the area knowna as Slobozhanschyna or Sloboda Ukraina, in what is now northeastern Ukraine. This territory was settled after being abandoned by the Tatars. Russian settlers however were outnumbered by Ukrainian settlers who were escaping harsh exploitative conditions in the west.

More Russian speakers appeared in northern, central and eastern Ukrainian territories during the late 17th century, following the Cossack Rebellion led by Bohdan Khmelnytsky. Following the Pereyaslav Rada the modern northern and eastern parts of Ukraine entered into the Tsardom of Russia. This brought a small wave of Russian settlers into central Ukraine (primarily several thousand soldiers stationed in garrisons, out of a population of approximately 1.2 million non-Russians). Although the number of Russian settlers in Ukraine prior to the eighteenth century was small, the local upper classes within the part of Ukraine acquired by Russia began to use the Russian language.

Beginning in the late eighteenth century, large numbers of Russians settled in newly acquired lands in southern Ukraine, a region then known as Novorossiya ("New Russia"). These lands had been largely empty prior to the eighteenth century due to the constant threat of raids by the Crimean Tatars, and once the Tatar state was eliminated, Russian nobles were granted large tracts of fertile land that was worked by newly-arrived peasants, most of whom were ethnic Ukrainians but some of whom were Russians.

The nineteenth century saw a dramatic increase in the urban Russian population in Ukraine, as Russian settlers moved into and populated the newly industrialized and growing towns. This phenomenon helped turn Ukraine's most important towns into Russophone environments. By the beginning of the 20th century the Russians were the largest ethnic group in almost all of Ukraine's largest cities, including the following: Kiev (54.2%), Kharkiv (63.1%), Odessa (49.09%), Mykolaiv (66.33%), Mariupol (63.22%), Luhansk (68.16%), Kherson (47.21%), Melitopol (42.8%), Dnipropetrovsk (41.78%), Kirovohrad (34.64%), Simferopol (45.64%), Yalta (66.17%), Kerch (57.8%), Sevastopol (63.46%).