Prior to the 16th century an insignificant number of Russians (or more precisely, Muscovites) lived in Ukraine. The Russian presence in Ukraine increased dramatically following the Pereiaslav Treaty of 1654. It consisted initially of garrisons in Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities and the presence of Muscovite voivodes. Beginning in the time of Peter I, Russian landowners acquired increasingly larger holdings in the Cossack Hetman state and Slobidska Ukraine. The Russian nobles often brought Russian serfs along with them to work, particularly in small-scale manufacturing enterprises. The tsarist authorities also forbade the Hetman state to trade with Western Europe as foreign commerce came to be controlled either by the government directly or by Russian merchants. The privileges thus accorded the Russians resulted in a further influx of Russian merchants or their agents into Ukraine, particularly to Kyiv and other larger centers. In the 18th century, there was a significant influx of Russian Old Believers into Ukraine. Having fled persecution at the hands of the Russian Orthodox church and the government, they established a number of settlements in the northern Chernihiv region. The exact number of Russians living in Ukrainian territories in the 18th century is unknown, but fragmentary data suggest that it was relatively small and mostly concentrated in Southern Ukraine. Russians were virtually absent from Right-Bank Ukraine (other than in or near Kyiv) prior to the second and third partitions of Poland in 1793 and 1795. Even then only a small number of civil servants and military personnel and a still smaller number of merchants, craftsmen, and itinerant workers moved into the region. However, the political and administrative changes that dismantled the Cossack Hetman state and the Zaporizhia and imposed Russian imperial rule had cleared a wide path for Russian immigration to Left-Bank Ukraine. By the early 19th century Russian civil servants, military men of various rank, landowners (particularly from the regions of Russia bordering on Ukraine), merchants, peddlers, craftsmen, and laborers had established themselves in Ukraine. The cities in Left-Bank Ukraine lost their right of Magdeburg law, and their economies, community life, and municipal governments increasingly fell under the control of recently arrived Russians. As a result the major cities of Ukraine developed an increasingly Russian character. Another wave of Russian immigration to Ukraine came in the 1880s, when Russians began flooding into the newly established industrial centers of the Donbas and the Dnieper Industrial Region as well as (to a lesser extent) Kharkiv... Learn more about the history of Russians in Ukraine by visiting the following entries:
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