Grey Ukraine
Grey Ukraine (also: Grey Klyn - Siryi Klyn; Ukrainian: Сірий Клин, also: Сіра Україна - "Grey Ukraine"; Russian: Серый Клин) is an unofficial name for a region in Southern Siberia and Northern Kazakhstan, where mass settlement of Ukrainians took place from the middle of the 18th to the beginning of the 20th century. Around 1917-1920 there was a movement for Ukrainian autonomy in the region.
History
The Ukrainian settlement of Siryi Klyn (literally: the "grey wedge")[1] developed around the city of Omsk in western Siberia.[2] M. Bondarenko, an emigrant from Poltava province, wrote before World War I: "The city of Omsk looks like a typical Moscovite city, but the bazaar and markets speak Ukrainian".[3] Altogether, before 1914, 1,604,873 emigrants from Ukraine settled in the area.
Historical Grey Ukraine exists roughly within the present-day northern Kazakhstan and southern Siberia.[4][5][1] It is not contiguous with other territories inhabited by Ukrainian diaspora, in a similar situation of territorial isolation as with Green Ukraine.[6]
Most of the Ukrainian migrations to Siberia happened between the mid-18th century and early 20th century. After conquering it in the early 18th century, the Russian Empire decided to resettle the region by handing 40% of newly created settlements there to Ukrainian settlers and 30% to Russian and Belarusian settlers.[7][3] By 1897, Ukrainians made up 7.5% of the population in Akmolinsk Oblast, which contained Omsk and surrounding regions.[8] Although the Russian Empire had tolerated expressions of Ukrainian identity, and the Soviet Union had initially adopted a Ukrainization policy in the region, by the end of 1932 the Ukrainization policy was reversed and the Ukrainian identity strongly declined.[7] Migration to the region continued throughout the Soviet period, and Nikita Khrushchev's virgin lands campaign during the 1950s encouraged further migration from across the Soviet Union.[2]
Demographics
In the Russian census of 1897, 51,103 people identified themselves as Little Russians (Ukrainians) in Akmolinsk (Omsk) Oblast, making up 7.5% of the population and forming the third-largest ethnic group after Kazakhs (62.6%) and Russians (25.5%).[8] According to the 2010 Russian census, 77,884 people (2.7%) of the Omsk Oblast identified themselves as Ukrainians, making Ukrainians the third-largest ethnic group there, after Russians and Kazakhs.[9]
References
- Andrew Wilson (15 October 2015). The Ukrainians: Unexpected Nation, Fourth Edition. Yale University Press. p. 117. ISBN 978-0-300-21965-4.
- Andrew Wilson (1997). Ukrainian Nationalism in the 1990s: A Minority Faith. Cambridge University Press. p. 180. ISBN 978-0-521-57457-0.
- Sergiychuk, V. "Сірий Клин - неофіційна сторінка української громади Омська" [The beginnings of Ukrainian settlements in the Grey Wedge]. www.siryj-klyn.narod.ru. Retrieved 2022-03-28.
- United States. Congress. House. Select Committee on Communist Aggression (1954). Baltic States investigation. U.S. Govt. Print. Off. p. 918.
- The Ukrainian Quarterly. Ukrainian Congress Committee of America. 1951. p. 56.
- Bohdan S. Wynar (2000). Independent Ukraine: A Bibliographic Guide to English-language Publications, 1989-1999. Ukrainian Academic Press. p. 101. ISBN 978-1-56308-670-0.
- Serhiichuk, Volodymyr (2022-03-24). "How Russians appropriate stranger's names, another's history, another's land". National Museum of the Holodomor-Genocide. Retrieved 2022-03-27.
- "Демоскоп Weekly - Приложение. Справочник статистических показателей". www.demoscope.ru. Retrieved 2022-03-28.
- Всероссийская перепись населения 2002 года: Приморский край [Russian Population Census 2002: Primorsky Krai] (in Russian). Demoscope.ru. 2002. Retrieved 3 June 2016.
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