Demographic history of Transnistria

Beside the droughty periods typical for the region, the second reason for the underpopulation of the Black Sea northern shores is the vicinity of the Tatars.

Transnistria was in the past an arid, underpopulated region that began to be colonized in the Middle Ages (after 1500, probably, but possibly even earlier) by Romanians that crossed the Dniester/Nistru river in search of free land and by some Tartars, its borders not being delimited as for a distinctive entity, a part of something.

[citation needed] The steppe around the Bug river was mostly depopulated in the 13th and 14th centuries because of the Golden Horde, according to some travelers (like in the "Chorographia Moldaviae" of Georg Reicherstorfer, written in 1541).

Meanwhile, the Romanian colonization east of Dniester – that had started around the year 1000 AD – had reached the Kiev area in the 15th century and in 1712 even the Don river, with the Dimitrie Cantemir leadership.

Since the Soviet era, Transnistria is home to three major groups: Romanians forming a plurality alongside Russians and Ukrainians.

Historically, after one century of russification, the Romanians were no more the majority of population in the areas of the Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (MASSR) established, in 1924, within the Ukrainian SSR.

In 1941, during World War II, when Romania created the Transnistria Governorate, an extended territory from the Dniester up to the Bug, most of the population was Ukrainian/Russian and only nearly 10% was Romanian.

In the years of the latter half of the 20th century, the ethnic proportions have changed in large measure due to industrialization and the immigration of Russian and Ukrainian workers.

By ethnic composition, the population of Transnistria was distributed as follows: Russians – 29.1%, Moldovans - 28.6%, Ukrainians – 22.9%, Bulgarians – 2.4%, Gagauzians – 1.1%, Belarusians – 0.5%, Transnistrian – 0.2%, other nationalities – 1.4%.

[9] According to the Moldovan Institute for Development and Social Initiative (IDIS) Viitorul, 306,000 people lived in Transnistria in 2021 compared to 731,000 thirty years earlier.