page_title: Ukrainians in Russia
section_title: Kuban
hierarchical_section_title: Ukrainians in Russia / Compact Ukrainian population centres in Russia / Kuban
context_page_description: Ukrainians in Russia make up the largest single diaspora group of the Ukrainian people. 1.9 million Ukrainians lived in Russia as of 2010, representing over 1.4% of the total population of the Russian Federation and comprising the third-largest ethnic group - after ethnic Russians and Tatars. An estimated 340,000 people born in Ukraine permanently settle legally in Russia each year.
  After the Euromaidan of 2013-1014 and the start of the ongoing War in Donbass at least 2,500,000 Ukrainian refugees had settled in Russia as of 2015.
  There are almost 5 6 million Ukrainian refugees and workers in Russia, remitting approximately 1 bn $/€ of workpay revenue back home.
  Following the outbreak of the Donbass War in 2014, over 420,000 asylum-seekers and refugees from Ukraine had registered in Russia as of November 2017.
context_section_description: The original Black Sea Cossacks colonised the Kuban region from 1792. Following the Caucasus War and the subsequent colonisation of the Circaucasus, the Black Sea Cossacks intermixed with other ethnic groups including the indigenous Cirsassian population.
  According to the 1897 census, 47.3% of the Kuban population (including extensive latter 19th-century non-Cossack migrants from both Ukraine and Russia) referred to their native language as Little Russian (the official term for the Ukrainian language) while 42.6% referred to their native language as Great Russian. Most of the cultural production in Kuban from the 1890s until the outbreak of World War I in 1914, such as plays, stories and music were written in the Ukrainian language, and one of the first political parties in Kuban was the Ukrainian Revolutionary Party. During the Russian Civil War with the Kuban Cossack Rada desperate for survival, turned to the Ukrainian People's Republic and formed a military alliance, as well declaring Ukrainian to be the official language of the Kuban National Republic. This decision was not supported uniformly by the Cossacks themselves and soon the Rada itself was dissolved by the Russian White Denikin's Volunteer Army.
  In the 1920s a policy of Decossackization was pursued. At the same time, the Bolshevik authorities supported policies that promoted the Ukrainian language and self-identity, opening 700 Ukrainian-language schools and a Ukrainian department in the local university. Russian historians claim that Cossacks were in this way forcibly Ukrainized, while Ukrainian historians claim that Ukrainization in Kuban merely paralleled Ukrainization in Ukraine itself, where people were being taught in their native language. According to the 1926 census, there were nearly a million Ukrainians registered in the Kuban Okrug alone (or 62% of the total population) During this period many Soviet repressions were tested on the Cossack lands, particularly the Black Boards that led to the Soviet famine of 1932-1934 in the Kuban. Yet by the mid-1930s there was an abrupt policy change of Soviet attitude towards Ukrainians in Russia. In the Kuban, the Ukrainization policy was halted and reversed. In 1936 the Kuban Cossack Chorus was however re-formed as were individual Cossack regiments in the Red Army. By the end of the 1930s many Cossacks' descendants chose to identify themselves as Russians. From that moment onwards almost all of the self-identified Ukrainians in the Kuban, date to non-Cossacks, the Soviet Census of 1989 showed that a total of 251,198 people in Krasnodar Kray (including Adyghe Autonomous Oblast) who were born in the Ukrainian SSR, and moved there by time of census. In the 2002 census, the number of people who identified themselves as Ukrainians in the Kuban was recorded to be 151,788. Despite the fact that most of the Kuban Cossacks descendants do not think of themselves as being nationally Ukrainians, and identify themselves as Russian nationals., many elements of their unique culture originates from Ukraine, such as the Kuban Bandurist music, and the dialect called Balachka which they speak.
caption: The first bandura school in 1913 organised in the Kuban directed by Vasyl Yemetz (centre).
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