Demographics of Crimea

A number of Englishmen, fleeing England after the Norman Conquest, were said to have settled in Crimea with the Byzantine Emperor’s permission, and comprised a majority of his Varangian Guard until the Empire’s collapse.

The lands were generously given to the Russian dvoryanstvo (nobility), and the enserfed peasantry mostly from Ukraine and fewer from Russia were transferred to cultivate what was a sparsely populated steppe.

With the October Revolution of 1917, with which the Russian Empire became the Soviet Union, a bitter period began for minorities in Russia.

Between 1936 and 1938, during Joseph Stalin's Great Purge, many Italians were accused of espionage and were arrested, tortured, deported or executed.

By the 1897 Russian Empire Census, Crimean Tatars continued to form a slight plurality (35%) of Crimea's still largely rural population, but there were large numbers of Russians (33%) and Ukrainians (11%), as well as smaller numbers of Germans, Jews (including Krymchaks and Crimean Karaites), Bulgarians, Belarusians, Turks, Armenians, Greeks and Roma (gypsies).

However, with the fall of the Soviet Union, exiled Crimean Tatars began returning to their homeland and accounted for 10% of the population by the beginning of the 21st century.

According to Ukraine's 2001 census, the ethnic makeup of Crimea's population consisted primarily of the following self-reported groups: Russians (1.450 million, 60.4%), Ukrainians (576,600; 24.0%), Crimean Tatars (258,400; 10.8%), Belarusians (25,000; 1.5%), Armenians (10,000; 0.4%), and Jews (5,500; 0.2%).

Other minorities are Black Sea Germans, Roma, Bulgarians, Poles, Azerbaijanis, Koreans, Greeks and Italians of Crimea.

[24] In 2013, however, the Crimean Tatar language was estimated to be on the brink of extinction, being taught in Crimea only in around 15 schools at that point of time.

Turkey has provided the greatest support to Ukraine, which has been unable to resolve the problem of education in the mother tongue in Crimea, by bringing the schools to a modern state.

Attempts to expand the usage of Ukrainian in education and government affairs have been less successful in Crimea than in other areas of the nation.

[20][30] Official Ukrainian authorities and Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar People claimed doubts that the results of population census in Crimea represent the facts.

In 988, Prince Vladimir I of Kyiv also captured the Byzantine town of Chersonesos (presently part of Sevastopol) where he later converted to Christianity.