Greeks in Russia
Encyclopedia
The Greek
presence in southern Russia
is dated to the 6th century BC. Today there are about 188,000 people of Greek extraction living in the Russian Federation. Most live in the south and the Black Sea
region (100,000) with large concentrations in Moscow (80,000) and St. Petersburg (3,000). About 70% are Greek-speakers from the Black Sea coast, 29% are Turkish-speaking Greeks (Urums
) from Tsalka
in Georgia
and 1% are Greek-speakers from Mariupol
in Ukraine
. According to the 2006 official census there are 100,000 Russian citizens of Greek extraction living in Russia. However, the leaders of the Greek community in Russia claim that their true numbers exceed this figure twofold.
In Greek mythology
, various contacts with the part of the world that was later named Russia or the Soviet Union are recorded. The area was vaguely described as the Hyperborea ("beyond the North wind
") and its mythical inhabitants, the Hyperboreans, were said to lived blissfully under eternal sunshine. Medea
was a princess of Colchis
, modern western Georgia
, and was entangled in the myth of Jason
and the Golden Fleece
. The Amazons
, a race of fierce female warriors, were placed by Herodotus
in Sarmatia
(modern Ukraine
).
In historical times, Greeks have lived in the present Black Sea region of Russia and the CIS
since long before the foundation of Kievan Rus'
, the first Russian state. The Greek name of Crimea
was Tauris and in mythology it was the home of the tribes who took Iphigenia prisoner in Euripides' play Iphigenia in Tauris.
Trade relations with the Scythians led to the foundation of the first outposts between 750 and 500 BC during the Old Greek Diaspora
. In the Eastern part of the Crimea the Bosporan kingdom
was founded with Panticapaeum (modern Kerch
) as its capital.
The Greeks had to fight off Scythian and Sarmatian (Alan) raiders who prevented them from progressing inland but retained the shores which became the wheat basket of the ancient Greek world. Following the conquests of Alexander the Great and the Roman conquest the provinces maintained active trading relations with the interior for centuries.
as Egypt and Syria were lost to Islam in the 7th c. Greek missionaries were sent among the steppe people, like the Alans
and Khazars
. Most notable were Saints Cyril and Methodius
of Thessalonica, who later became known as the apostles of the Slavs.
Many Greeks remained in Crimea after the Bosporan kingdom
fell to the Huns and the Goths, and Chersonesos became part of the Byzantine Empire
. Orthodox monasteries continued to function, with strong links with the monasteries of Mount Athos
in northern Greece.
Relations with the people from the Kievan Rus principality were stormy at first, leading to several short lived conflicts
, but gradually raiding turned to trading and many also joined the Byzantine military, becoming its finest soldiers
. In 965 AD there were 16,000 Crimean Greeks in the joint Byzantine and Kievan Rus army which invaded Bulgaria
.
Subsequently Byzantine power in the Black Sea region waned, but ties between the two people were strengthened tremendously in cultural and political terms with the baptism of Prince Vladimir of Kievan Rus in 988 and the subsequent Christianization of his realm.
The post as Metropolitan bishop
of the Russian Orthodox Church
was, in fact, with few exceptions, held by a Byzantine Greek
all the way to the 15th century. One notable such prelate was Isidore of Kiev
.
in the 15th century, there was an exodus of Greeks both to the West and to Russia. Together with the marriage of Greek Princess Sophia and Tsar Ivan III of Russia
, this provided a historical precedent for the Muscovite political theory of the Third Rome
, positing Moscow as the legitimate successor to Rome and Byzantium.
Greeks continued to migrate in the following centuries. Many sought protection in a country with a culture and religion related to theirs. Greek clerics, soldiers and diplomats found employment in Russia and Ukraine while Greek merchants came to make use of privileges that were extended to them in Ottoman-Russian trade.
Under Catherine the Great, Russian armies reached the shores of the Black Sea, followed by the foundation of Odessa
- greatly facilitating the settlement of Greeks, many thousands of whem were settled in the empire’s south under this empress.
There were over 500.000 Greeks in Tsarist Russia prior to the Russian Revolution, between 150.000 and 200.000 of them within the borders of the present-day Russian Federation.
There have been several notable Greeks from Russia like Ioannis Kapodistrias
, diplomat of the Russian Empire who became the first head of state of Greece, and the painter Arkhip Kuinji.
of 1917, there were contradictory trends in Soviet governmental polices towards ethnic Greeks. Greeks engaged in trade or other occupations that marked them as class enemies of the Bolshevik
government - who constituted a large part of the whole - were exposed to a hostile attitude. This was exacerbated
due to the participation of a regiment from Greece, numbering 24,000 troops, in Crimea among the forces intervening on the White Russian
side in the Civil War of 1919
About 50,000 Greeks emigrated between 1919 and 1924. After 1924 Soviet authorities pressed Greece to repatriate 70,000 Greeks from Russia, although few actually had ancestors who were citizens of the Greek state.
On the other hand, as with other ethnic nationalities, the early Bolsheviks under Lenin and his immediate successors were willing to encourage ethnic culture manifestations of those ready to work within the new revolutionary regime.
In this farmework, a Rumaiic revival occurred in the 1920s. The Soviet administration established a Greek-Rumaiic theater, several magazines and newspapers and a number of Rumaiic language schools. The best Rumaiic poet Georgi Kostoprav created a Rumaiic poetic language for his work. Promoting the Rumaiic, as against the Demotic Greek of Greece, was in effect a way of promoting the separate identity of the Greeks in Russia.
Different sources referring to this period differ in putting the empahsis on the positive or the negative aspects of the 1920s Soviet policy.
The policy underwent a sharp reversal in 1937. At the time of the Moscow Trials
and the purges targeting various groups and individuals who aroused Stalin's often unbased suspicions, policies towards ethnic Greeks became unequivocally harsh and hostile. Kostoprav and many other Rumaiics and Urums were killed, and a large percentage of the population was detained and transported to Gulag
s or deported to remote parts of the Soviet Union.
Greek Orthodox churches, Greek-language schools and other cultural institutions were closed. During the "Grecheskaya Operatsiya
" (Греческая Операция) i.e. Greek Operation, launched on Stalin's orders in December 1937, there were mass arrests of Greeks, especially but not only wealthy and self-employed, affecting some 50,000 Greeks out of an overall community of 450,000.
In the immediate aftermath of the World War II German invasion of the Soviet Union, ethnic Greeks were included in the 1941-1942 "preventive" deportations of Soviet citizens of "enemy nationality", together with ethnic Germans, Finns, Romanians, Italians, and others - even though Greece fought on the Allied side. The Greeks then suffered under Nazi occupation and when Crimea was liberated in 1944, most of the Greeks were exiled to Kazakhstan
, along with the Crimean Tatars
. (Some of these Greeks, known as Urums
, spoke a variant of the Crimean Tatar language
as the mother tongue they adopted during centuries of life in proximity to the Tartars).
In a further wave, about 100,000 Pontic Greeks
, including 37,000 in the Caucasus area alone, were deported to Central Asia in 1949 during Stalin's post-war deportations.
At about the same time, the last major immigration occurred in the opposite direction, of Greeks going to Russia and the Soviet Union. After the end of the Greek civil war
the defeated Communist supporters became political refugees. Over 10,000 of them ended up in the Soviet Union.
After the de-Stalinization
, Greeks were gradually allowed to return to their homes in the Black Sea region. Many have emigrated to Greece since the early 1990s.
A new attempt to preserve a sense of ethnic Rumaiic identity started in the mid-1980s. The Ukrainian scholar Andriy Biletsky created a new Slavonic alphabet, though a number of writers and poets make use of this alphabet, the population of the region rarely uses it. carried out in 2001–2004 and were organized by St. Petersburg State University
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Many Greeks now seek to emigrate to Greece
. In 1990, 22,500 Pontian Greeks left the Soviet Union
, a dramatic increase from previous years. Figures for 1991 indicate that about 1,800 left every month, primarily from Central Asia and Georgia.
Today most Greeks in the former USSR speak Russian
, with a significant number speaking their traditional Pontian Greek language. Pontian is a Greek dialect that derives from the ancient Ionic Greek
dialect and resembles ancient Greek more than the modern "demotic" Greek language.
Until recently, the ban on teaching Greek in Soviet schools meant that Pontian was spoken only in a domestic context. Consequently, many Greeks, especially those of the younger generation, speak Russian as their first language.
Linguistically, Greeks are far from being unified. In Ukraine alone, there are at least five documented Greek linguistic groups, which are broadly categorized as the "Mariupol dialect", a term derived from the city of Mariupol
, a traditional center of this community. Other Greeks in the Crimea
speak Tatar, and in regions such as Tsalka
in Georgia there are numerous Turkophone Greeks
.
Greeks were permitted to teach their own language again during Perestroika
, and a number of schools are now teaching Greek. Because of their strongly philhellenic sentiments and ambitions to live in Greece, this is normally modern, Demotic Greek rather than Pontian.
Cosmonaut, Fyodor Yurchikhin
has Greek Ancestry.
Close to 35% of the Russian Greeks live in the Caucassian province of Stavropol Krai
. The city of Yessentuki is regarded as the Greek cultural capital of Russia. Many of the famous Greek Russians, like Euclid Kyurdzidis
hail from this city where Greeks constitute 5.7% (Up from 5.4% in 1989) of the total population. Greeks constitute 3% (2.9% in 1989) of the population in Zheleznovodsk
City and 4.7% in Inozemtsevo (5.1% in 1989). But the majority of the Greeks live in the rural regions of Stavropol and major concentrations can be found in the rural districts of Andropovsky (3.3% in 2002, 2.1% in 1989), Mineralovodsky (3.8% in 2002, 3.4% in 1989) and Predgorny (16.0% in 2002, 12.2% in 1989). While the ethnic Greek population decreased in many provinces due to emigration, in the Stavropol province it actually rose from 26,828 in 1989 to 34,078 in 2002. A significant ethnic Greek population also exists in nearby Krasnodar Krai
.
Greeks
The Greeks, also known as the Hellenes , are a nation and ethnic group native to Greece, Cyprus and neighboring regions. They also form a significant diaspora, with Greek communities established around the world....
presence in southern Russia
Russia
Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...
is dated to the 6th century BC. Today there are about 188,000 people of Greek extraction living in the Russian Federation. Most live in the south and the Black Sea
Black Sea
The Black Sea is bounded by Europe, Anatolia and the Caucasus and is ultimately connected to the Atlantic Ocean via the Mediterranean and the Aegean seas and various straits. The Bosphorus strait connects it to the Sea of Marmara, and the strait of the Dardanelles connects that sea to the Aegean...
region (100,000) with large concentrations in Moscow (80,000) and St. Petersburg (3,000). About 70% are Greek-speakers from the Black Sea coast, 29% are Turkish-speaking Greeks (Urums
Urums
Urums, singular Urum is a broad historical term that was used by some Turkic-speaking peoples to define Greeks who lived in Muslim states, particularly in the Ottoman Empire and Crimea...
) from Tsalka
Tsalka
- Population :The district had a population of 22,000. According to the 2002 census 55% of its population is Armenian, 22% Greek, 12% Georgian, and 9.5% Azerbaijanis...
in Georgia
Georgia (country)
Georgia is a sovereign state in the Caucasus region of Eurasia. Located at the crossroads of Western Asia and Eastern Europe, it is bounded to the west by the Black Sea, to the north by Russia, to the southwest by Turkey, to the south by Armenia, and to the southeast by Azerbaijan. The capital of...
and 1% are Greek-speakers from Mariupol
Mariupol
Mariupol , formerly known as Zhdanov , is a port city in southeastern Ukraine. It is located on the coast of the Azov Sea, at the mouth of the Kalmius River. Mariupol is the largest city in Priazovye - a geographical region around Azov Sea, divided by Russia and Ukraine - and is also a popular sea...
in Ukraine
Ukraine
Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It has an area of 603,628 km², making it the second largest contiguous country on the European continent, after Russia...
. According to the 2006 official census there are 100,000 Russian citizens of Greek extraction living in Russia. However, the leaders of the Greek community in Russia claim that their true numbers exceed this figure twofold.
Ancient
Greek mythology
Greek mythology is the body of myths and legends belonging to the ancient Greeks, concerning their gods and heroes, the nature of the world, and the origins and significance of their own cult and ritual practices. They were a part of religion in ancient Greece...
, various contacts with the part of the world that was later named Russia or the Soviet Union are recorded. The area was vaguely described as the Hyperborea ("beyond the North wind
North wind
A north wind is a wind that originates in the north and blows south. The north wind has had historical and literal significance, since it often signals cold weather and seasonal change in the Northern hemisphere.-Mythology:...
") and its mythical inhabitants, the Hyperboreans, were said to lived blissfully under eternal sunshine. Medea
Medea
Medea is a woman in Greek mythology. She was the daughter of King Aeëtes of Colchis, niece of Circe, granddaughter of the sun god Helios, and later wife to the hero Jason, with whom she had two children, Mermeros and Pheres. In Euripides's play Medea, Jason leaves Medea when Creon, king of...
was a princess of Colchis
Colchis
In ancient geography, Colchis or Kolkhis was an ancient Georgian state kingdom and region in Western Georgia, which played an important role in the ethnic and cultural formation of the Georgian nation.The Kingdom of Colchis contributed significantly to the development of medieval Georgian...
, modern western Georgia
Georgia (U.S. state)
Georgia is a state located in the southeastern United States. It was established in 1732, the last of the original Thirteen Colonies. The state is named after King George II of Great Britain. Georgia was the fourth state to ratify the United States Constitution, on January 2, 1788...
, and was entangled in the myth of Jason
Jason
Jason was a late ancient Greek mythological hero from the late 10th Century BC, famous as the leader of the Argonauts and their quest for the Golden Fleece. He was the son of Aeson, the rightful king of Iolcus...
and the Golden Fleece
Golden Fleece
In Greek mythology, the Golden Fleece is the fleece of the gold-haired winged ram, which can be procured in Colchis. It figures in the tale of Jason and his band of Argonauts, who set out on a quest by order of King Pelias for the fleece in order to place Jason rightfully on the throne of Iolcus...
. The Amazons
Amazons
The Amazons are a nation of all-female warriors in Greek mythology and Classical antiquity. Herodotus placed them in a region bordering Scythia in Sarmatia...
, a race of fierce female warriors, were placed by Herodotus
Herodotus
Herodotus was an ancient Greek historian who was born in Halicarnassus, Caria and lived in the 5th century BC . He has been called the "Father of History", and was the first historian known to collect his materials systematically, test their accuracy to a certain extent and arrange them in a...
in Sarmatia
Sarmatia
Sarmatia or Sarmatian can refer to:* the land of Sarmatians, western Scythia as described by many classical authors, such as Herodotus in the 5th century BC* Sarmatian languages, part of Scythian languages...
(modern Ukraine
Ukraine
Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It has an area of 603,628 km², making it the second largest contiguous country on the European continent, after Russia...
).
In historical times, Greeks have lived in the present Black Sea region of Russia and the CIS
CIS
CIS usually refers to the Commonwealth of Independent States, a modern political entity consisting of eleven former Soviet Union republics.The acronym CIS may also refer to:-Organizations:...
since long before the foundation of Kievan Rus'
Kievan Rus'
Kievan Rus was a medieval polity in Eastern Europe, from the late 9th to the mid 13th century, when it disintegrated under the pressure of the Mongol invasion of 1237–1240....
, the first Russian state. The Greek name of Crimea
Crimea
Crimea , or the Autonomous Republic of Crimea , is a sub-national unit, an autonomous republic, of Ukraine. It is located on the northern coast of the Black Sea, occupying a peninsula of the same name...
was Tauris and in mythology it was the home of the tribes who took Iphigenia prisoner in Euripides' play Iphigenia in Tauris.
Trade relations with the Scythians led to the foundation of the first outposts between 750 and 500 BC during the Old Greek Diaspora
Greek diaspora
The Greek diaspora, also known as Hellenic Diaspora or Diaspora of Hellenism, is a term used to refer to the communities of Greek people living outside the traditional Greek homelands, but more commonly in southeast Europe and Asia Minor...
. In the Eastern part of the Crimea the Bosporan kingdom
Bosporan Kingdom
The Bosporan Kingdom or the Kingdom of the Cimmerian Bosporus was an ancient state, located in eastern Crimea and the Taman Peninsula on the shores of the Cimmerian Bosporus...
was founded with Panticapaeum (modern Kerch
Kerch
Kerch is a city on the Kerch Peninsula of eastern Crimea, an important industrial, transport and tourist centre of Ukraine. Kerch, founded 2600 years ago, is considered as one of the most ancient cities in Ukraine.-Ancient times:...
) as its capital.
The Greeks had to fight off Scythian and Sarmatian (Alan) raiders who prevented them from progressing inland but retained the shores which became the wheat basket of the ancient Greek world. Following the conquests of Alexander the Great and the Roman conquest the provinces maintained active trading relations with the interior for centuries.
Medieval
Black Sea trade became more important for ConstantinopleConstantinople
Constantinople was the capital of the Roman, Eastern Roman, Byzantine, Latin, and Ottoman Empires. Throughout most of the Middle Ages, Constantinople was Europe's largest and wealthiest city.-Names:...
as Egypt and Syria were lost to Islam in the 7th c. Greek missionaries were sent among the steppe people, like the Alans
Alans
The Alans, or the Alani, occasionally termed Alauni or Halani, were a group of Sarmatian tribes, nomadic pastoralists of the 1st millennium AD who spoke an Eastern Iranian language which derived from Scytho-Sarmatian and which in turn evolved into modern Ossetian.-Name:The various forms of Alan —...
and Khazars
Khazars
The Khazars were semi-nomadic Turkic people who established one of the largest polities of medieval Eurasia, with the capital of Atil and territory comprising much of modern-day European Russia, western Kazakhstan, eastern Ukraine, Azerbaijan, large portions of the northern Caucasus , parts of...
. Most notable were Saints Cyril and Methodius
Saints Cyril and Methodius
Saints Cyril and Methodius were two Byzantine Greek brothers born in Thessaloniki in the 9th century. They became missionaries of Christianity among the Slavic peoples of Bulgaria, Great Moravia and Pannonia. Through their work they influenced the cultural development of all Slavs, for which they...
of Thessalonica, who later became known as the apostles of the Slavs.
Many Greeks remained in Crimea after the Bosporan kingdom
Bosporan Kingdom
The Bosporan Kingdom or the Kingdom of the Cimmerian Bosporus was an ancient state, located in eastern Crimea and the Taman Peninsula on the shores of the Cimmerian Bosporus...
fell to the Huns and the Goths, and Chersonesos became part of the Byzantine Empire
Byzantine Empire
The Byzantine Empire was the Eastern Roman Empire during the periods of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, centred on the capital of Constantinople. Known simply as the Roman Empire or Romania to its inhabitants and neighbours, the Empire was the direct continuation of the Ancient Roman State...
. Orthodox monasteries continued to function, with strong links with the monasteries of Mount Athos
Mount Athos
Mount Athos is a mountain and peninsula in Macedonia, Greece. A World Heritage Site, it is home to 20 Eastern Orthodox monasteries and forms a self-governed monastic state within the sovereignty of the Hellenic Republic. Spiritually, Mount Athos comes under the direct jurisdiction of the...
in northern Greece.
Relations with the people from the Kievan Rus principality were stormy at first, leading to several short lived conflicts
Rus'-Byzantine War
Rus'–Byzantine War may refer to one of the following conflicts:*Paphlagonian expedition of the Rus' *Rus'–Byzantine War *Rus'–Byzantine War *Rus'–Byzantine War *Rus'–Byzantine War *Rus'–Byzantine War...
, but gradually raiding turned to trading and many also joined the Byzantine military, becoming its finest soldiers
Varangians
The Varangians or Varyags , sometimes referred to as Variagians, were people from the Baltic region, most often associated with Vikings, who from the 9th to 11th centuries ventured eastwards and southwards along the rivers of Eastern Europe, through what is now Russia, Belarus and Ukraine.According...
. In 965 AD there were 16,000 Crimean Greeks in the joint Byzantine and Kievan Rus army which invaded Bulgaria
Bulgaria
Bulgaria , officially the Republic of Bulgaria , is a parliamentary democracy within a unitary constitutional republic in Southeast Europe. The country borders Romania to the north, Serbia and Macedonia to the west, Greece and Turkey to the south, as well as the Black Sea to the east...
.
Subsequently Byzantine power in the Black Sea region waned, but ties between the two people were strengthened tremendously in cultural and political terms with the baptism of Prince Vladimir of Kievan Rus in 988 and the subsequent Christianization of his realm.
The post as Metropolitan bishop
Metropolitan bishop
In Christian churches with episcopal polity, the rank of metropolitan bishop, or simply metropolitan, pertains to the diocesan bishop or archbishop of a metropolis; that is, the chief city of a historical Roman province, ecclesiastical province, or regional capital.Before the establishment of...
of the Russian Orthodox Church
Russian Orthodox Church
The Russian Orthodox Church or, alternatively, the Moscow Patriarchate The ROC is often said to be the largest of the Eastern Orthodox churches in the world; including all the autocephalous churches under its umbrella, its adherents number over 150 million worldwide—about half of the 300 million...
was, in fact, with few exceptions, held by a Byzantine Greek
Byzantine Greeks
Byzantine Greeks or Byzantines is a conventional term used by modern historians to refer to the medieval Greek or Hellenised citizens of the Byzantine Empire, centered mainly in Constantinople, the southern Balkans, the Greek islands, Asia Minor , Cyprus and the large urban centres of the Near East...
all the way to the 15th century. One notable such prelate was Isidore of Kiev
Isidore of Kiev
Isidore of Kiev, also known as Isidore of Thessalonica was a Greek Metropolitan of Kiev, cardinal, humanist, and theologian. He was one of the chief Eastern defenders of reunion at the time of the Council of Florence.-Early life:...
.
Tsarist Russia
With the Fall of ConstantinopleFall of Constantinople
The Fall of Constantinople was the capture of the capital of the Byzantine Empire, which occurred after a siege by the Ottoman Empire, under the command of Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II, against the defending army commanded by Byzantine Emperor Constantine XI...
in the 15th century, there was an exodus of Greeks both to the West and to Russia. Together with the marriage of Greek Princess Sophia and Tsar Ivan III of Russia
Ivan III of Russia
Ivan III Vasilyevich , also known as Ivan the Great, was a Grand Prince of Moscow and "Grand Prince of all Rus"...
, this provided a historical precedent for the Muscovite political theory of the Third Rome
Third Rome
The term Third Rome describes the idea that some European city, state, or country is the successor to the legacy of the Roman Empire and its successor state, the Byzantine Empire ....
, positing Moscow as the legitimate successor to Rome and Byzantium.
Greeks continued to migrate in the following centuries. Many sought protection in a country with a culture and religion related to theirs. Greek clerics, soldiers and diplomats found employment in Russia and Ukraine while Greek merchants came to make use of privileges that were extended to them in Ottoman-Russian trade.
Under Catherine the Great, Russian armies reached the shores of the Black Sea, followed by the foundation of Odessa
Odessa
Odessa or Odesa is the administrative center of the Odessa Oblast located in southern Ukraine. The city is a major seaport located on the northwest shore of the Black Sea and the fourth largest city in Ukraine with a population of 1,029,000 .The predecessor of Odessa, a small Tatar settlement,...
- greatly facilitating the settlement of Greeks, many thousands of whem were settled in the empire’s south under this empress.
There were over 500.000 Greeks in Tsarist Russia prior to the Russian Revolution, between 150.000 and 200.000 of them within the borders of the present-day Russian Federation.
There have been several notable Greeks from Russia like Ioannis Kapodistrias
Ioannis Kapodistrias
Count Ioannis Antonios Kapodistrias |Academy of Athens]] Critical Observations about the 6th-Grade History Textbook"): "3.2.7. Σελ. 40: Δεν αναφέρεται ότι ο Καποδίστριας ήταν Κερκυραίος ευγενής." "...δύο ιστορικούς της Aκαδημίας κ.κ...
, diplomat of the Russian Empire who became the first head of state of Greece, and the painter Arkhip Kuinji.
Soviet Union
In the early years after the October RevolutionOctober Revolution
The October Revolution , also known as the Great October Socialist Revolution , Red October, the October Uprising or the Bolshevik Revolution, was a political revolution and a part of the Russian Revolution of 1917...
of 1917, there were contradictory trends in Soviet governmental polices towards ethnic Greeks. Greeks engaged in trade or other occupations that marked them as class enemies of the Bolshevik
Bolshevik
The Bolsheviks, originally also Bolshevists , derived from bol'shinstvo, "majority") were a faction of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party which split apart from the Menshevik faction at the Second Party Congress in 1903....
government - who constituted a large part of the whole - were exposed to a hostile attitude. This was exacerbated
due to the participation of a regiment from Greece, numbering 24,000 troops, in Crimea among the forces intervening on the White Russian
White movement
The White movement and its military arm the White Army - known as the White Guard or the Whites - was a loose confederation of Anti-Communist forces.The movement comprised one of the politico-military Russian forces who fought...
side in the Civil War of 1919
Russian Civil War
The Russian Civil War was a multi-party war that occurred within the former Russian Empire after the Russian provisional government collapsed to the Soviets, under the domination of the Bolshevik party. Soviet forces first assumed power in Petrograd The Russian Civil War (1917–1923) was a...
About 50,000 Greeks emigrated between 1919 and 1924. After 1924 Soviet authorities pressed Greece to repatriate 70,000 Greeks from Russia, although few actually had ancestors who were citizens of the Greek state.
On the other hand, as with other ethnic nationalities, the early Bolsheviks under Lenin and his immediate successors were willing to encourage ethnic culture manifestations of those ready to work within the new revolutionary regime.
In this farmework, a Rumaiic revival occurred in the 1920s. The Soviet administration established a Greek-Rumaiic theater, several magazines and newspapers and a number of Rumaiic language schools. The best Rumaiic poet Georgi Kostoprav created a Rumaiic poetic language for his work. Promoting the Rumaiic, as against the Demotic Greek of Greece, was in effect a way of promoting the separate identity of the Greeks in Russia.
Different sources referring to this period differ in putting the empahsis on the positive or the negative aspects of the 1920s Soviet policy.
The policy underwent a sharp reversal in 1937. At the time of the Moscow Trials
Moscow Trials
The Moscow Trials were a series of show trials conducted in the Soviet Union and orchestrated by Joseph Stalin during the Great Purge of the 1930s. The victims included most of the surviving Old Bolsheviks, as well as the leadership of the Soviet secret police...
and the purges targeting various groups and individuals who aroused Stalin's often unbased suspicions, policies towards ethnic Greeks became unequivocally harsh and hostile. Kostoprav and many other Rumaiics and Urums were killed, and a large percentage of the population was detained and transported to Gulag
Gulag
The Gulag was the government agency that administered the main Soviet forced labor camp systems. While the camps housed a wide range of convicts, from petty criminals to political prisoners, large numbers were convicted by simplified procedures, such as NKVD troikas and other instruments of...
s or deported to remote parts of the Soviet Union.
Greek Orthodox churches, Greek-language schools and other cultural institutions were closed. During the "Grecheskaya Operatsiya
Grecheskaya Operatsiya
The so-called Greek Operation was an organised mass persecution of the 450 000 Greeks of the Soviet Union that was ordered by Joseph Stalin. Greeks often use the term "pogrom" for this persecution, though this term usually refers to mob violence rather than persecution by police acting under...
" (Греческая Операция) i.e. Greek Operation, launched on Stalin's orders in December 1937, there were mass arrests of Greeks, especially but not only wealthy and self-employed, affecting some 50,000 Greeks out of an overall community of 450,000.
In the immediate aftermath of the World War II German invasion of the Soviet Union, ethnic Greeks were included in the 1941-1942 "preventive" deportations of Soviet citizens of "enemy nationality", together with ethnic Germans, Finns, Romanians, Italians, and others - even though Greece fought on the Allied side. The Greeks then suffered under Nazi occupation and when Crimea was liberated in 1944, most of the Greeks were exiled to Kazakhstan
Kazakhstan
Kazakhstan , officially the Republic of Kazakhstan, is a transcontinental country in Central Asia and Eastern Europe. Ranked as the ninth largest country in the world, it is also the world's largest landlocked country; its territory of is greater than Western Europe...
, along with the Crimean Tatars
Crimean Tatars
Crimean Tatars or Crimeans are a Turkic ethnic group that originally resided in Crimea. They speak the Crimean Tatar language...
. (Some of these Greeks, known as Urums
Urums
Urums, singular Urum is a broad historical term that was used by some Turkic-speaking peoples to define Greeks who lived in Muslim states, particularly in the Ottoman Empire and Crimea...
, spoke a variant of the Crimean Tatar language
Crimean Tatar language
The Crimean Tatar language is the language of the Crimean Tatars. It is a Turkic language spoken in Crimea, Central Asia , and the Crimean Tatar diasporas in Turkey, Romania, Bulgaria...
as the mother tongue they adopted during centuries of life in proximity to the Tartars).
In a further wave, about 100,000 Pontic Greeks
Pontic Greeks
The Pontians are an ethnic group traditionally living in the Pontus region, the shores of Turkey's Black Sea...
, including 37,000 in the Caucasus area alone, were deported to Central Asia in 1949 during Stalin's post-war deportations.
At about the same time, the last major immigration occurred in the opposite direction, of Greeks going to Russia and the Soviet Union. After the end of the Greek civil war
Greek Civil War
The Greek Civil War was fought from 1946 to 1949 between the Greek governmental army, backed by the United Kingdom and United States, and the Democratic Army of Greece , the military branch of the Greek Communist Party , backed by Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and Albania...
the defeated Communist supporters became political refugees. Over 10,000 of them ended up in the Soviet Union.
After the de-Stalinization
De-Stalinization
De-Stalinization refers to the process of eliminating the cult of personality, Stalinist political system and the Gulag labour-camp system created by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. Stalin was succeeded by a collective leadership after his death in March 1953...
, Greeks were gradually allowed to return to their homes in the Black Sea region. Many have emigrated to Greece since the early 1990s.
A new attempt to preserve a sense of ethnic Rumaiic identity started in the mid-1980s. The Ukrainian scholar Andriy Biletsky created a new Slavonic alphabet, though a number of writers and poets make use of this alphabet, the population of the region rarely uses it. carried out in 2001–2004 and were organized by St. Petersburg State University
Current
Greece
Greece , officially the Hellenic Republic , and historically Hellas or the Republic of Greece in English, is a country in southeastern Europe....
. In 1990, 22,500 Pontian Greeks left the Soviet Union
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
, a dramatic increase from previous years. Figures for 1991 indicate that about 1,800 left every month, primarily from Central Asia and Georgia.
Today most Greeks in the former USSR speak Russian
Russian language
Russian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...
, with a significant number speaking their traditional Pontian Greek language. Pontian is a Greek dialect that derives from the ancient Ionic Greek
Ionic Greek
Ionic Greek was a subdialect of the Attic–Ionic dialect group of Ancient Greek .-History:Ionic dialect appears to have spread originally from the Greek mainland across the Aegean at the time of the Dorian invasions, around the 11th Century B.C.By the end of the Greek Dark Ages in the 5th Century...
dialect and resembles ancient Greek more than the modern "demotic" Greek language.
Until recently, the ban on teaching Greek in Soviet schools meant that Pontian was spoken only in a domestic context. Consequently, many Greeks, especially those of the younger generation, speak Russian as their first language.
Linguistically, Greeks are far from being unified. In Ukraine alone, there are at least five documented Greek linguistic groups, which are broadly categorized as the "Mariupol dialect", a term derived from the city of Mariupol
Mariupol
Mariupol , formerly known as Zhdanov , is a port city in southeastern Ukraine. It is located on the coast of the Azov Sea, at the mouth of the Kalmius River. Mariupol is the largest city in Priazovye - a geographical region around Azov Sea, divided by Russia and Ukraine - and is also a popular sea...
, a traditional center of this community. Other Greeks in the Crimea
Crimea
Crimea , or the Autonomous Republic of Crimea , is a sub-national unit, an autonomous republic, of Ukraine. It is located on the northern coast of the Black Sea, occupying a peninsula of the same name...
speak Tatar, and in regions such as Tsalka
Tsalka
- Population :The district had a population of 22,000. According to the 2002 census 55% of its population is Armenian, 22% Greek, 12% Georgian, and 9.5% Azerbaijanis...
in Georgia there are numerous Turkophone Greeks
Urums
Urums, singular Urum is a broad historical term that was used by some Turkic-speaking peoples to define Greeks who lived in Muslim states, particularly in the Ottoman Empire and Crimea...
.
Greeks were permitted to teach their own language again during Perestroika
Perestroika
Perestroika was a political movement within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union during 1980s, widely associated with the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev...
, and a number of schools are now teaching Greek. Because of their strongly philhellenic sentiments and ambitions to live in Greece, this is normally modern, Demotic Greek rather than Pontian.
Cosmonaut, Fyodor Yurchikhin
Fyodor Yurchikhin
Fyodor Nikolayevich Yurchikhin , is a Russian cosmonaut and RSC Energia test-pilot who has flown on three spaceflights. His first spaceflight was a 10-day Space Shuttle mission STS-112. His second was a long-duration stay aboard the International Space Station as a Flight Engineer for Expedition...
has Greek Ancestry.
Close to 35% of the Russian Greeks live in the Caucassian province of Stavropol Krai
Stavropol Krai
Stavropol Krai is a federal subject of Russia . Its administrative center is the city of Stavropol. Population: -Geography:Stavropol Krai encompasses the central part of the Fore-Caucasus and most of the northern slopes of Caucasus Major...
. The city of Yessentuki is regarded as the Greek cultural capital of Russia. Many of the famous Greek Russians, like Euclid Kyurdzidis
Euclid Kyurdzidis
Euclid Kiriakovich Kyurdzidis, a.k.a Euclid Gurdjieff is a Russian actor, best known for his role as Ruslan Shamayev in Voyna. He was born to ethnic Greek parents in Yessentuki, Stavropol Krai. He has two brothers and an older sister.-External links:* *...
hail from this city where Greeks constitute 5.7% (Up from 5.4% in 1989) of the total population. Greeks constitute 3% (2.9% in 1989) of the population in Zheleznovodsk
Zheleznovodsk
Zheleznovodsk is a town in Stavropol Krai, Russia. Population: The name of the town literally means iron-water-place, as the mineral waters springing from the earth in Zheleznovodsk were believed to have high content of iron. Zheleznovodsk, along with Pyatigorsk, Yessentuki, Kislovodsk, and...
City and 4.7% in Inozemtsevo (5.1% in 1989). But the majority of the Greeks live in the rural regions of Stavropol and major concentrations can be found in the rural districts of Andropovsky (3.3% in 2002, 2.1% in 1989), Mineralovodsky (3.8% in 2002, 3.4% in 1989) and Predgorny (16.0% in 2002, 12.2% in 1989). While the ethnic Greek population decreased in many provinces due to emigration, in the Stavropol province it actually rose from 26,828 in 1989 to 34,078 in 2002. A significant ethnic Greek population also exists in nearby Krasnodar Krai
Krasnodar Krai
-External links:* **...
.