Baltic Russians

Russians in the Baltic states describes self-identifying ethnic Russians and other primary Russian-speaking communities in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, commonly referred to collectively as the Baltic states. In 2011, there were 1,052,520 ethnic Russians in the Baltic States (556,422 in Latvia, 321,198 in Estonia, 174,900 in Lithuania), having declined from 1,726,000 in 1989, the year of the last census during the Soviet era.

Most of the present-day Baltic Russians are migrants from the Soviet era and their descendants, whereas only a relatively small fraction of them can trace their ancestry in the area back to previous centuries.

According to official statistics, in 1920, ethnic Russians (most of them residing there from the times of the Russian Empire) made up 7.82% of the population in independent Latvia, growing to 10.5% in 1935. The share of ethnic Russians in the population of independent Estonia was about 8.2%, of which about half were indigenous Russians living in the areas in and around Pechory and Izborsk which were added to Estonian territory according to the 1920 Estonian-Soviet Peace Treaty of Tartu, but were transferred to the Russian SFSR by the Soviet authorities in 1945. The share of ethnic Russians in independent Lithuania (not including the Vilnius region, then annexed by Poland) was even smaller, about 2.5%.

Following the terms of the 1939 Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, the Soviet Union invaded and occupied and subsequently annexed Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania as Soviet republics in 1940. Germany invaded and occupied the Baltic states in 1941 a week after the first Soviet-conducted mass deportation. Communist party members who had arrived in the area with the initial annexation in 1940 and the puppet regimes established evacuated to other parts of the Soviet Union; those who fell into German hands were treated harshly or murdered. The Soviet Union reoccupied the Baltic states in 1944–1945 as the war drew to a close.

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