All events · Empire, Clearance and Removal
Russia's Annexation of the Crimean Khanate, the 1778 Deportation of Crimea's Christians and the Destruction of the Zaporozhian Sich
1775–1783 · Europe & Northern Eurasia
Displacement
Territory Seized
Displaced
130,000
About 31,000 Greeks, Armenians, Georgians and Vlachs were removed from Crimea to the northern Azov littoral in 1778-1779; the figure comes from the resettlement registers kept by Suvorov's command and by Metropolitan Ignaty, and is unusually well documented for the period. Perhaps 100,000 or more Crimean Tatars emigrated to Ottoman lands in the two decades after annexation, a figure reconstructed from Russian provincial returns and Ottoman settlement records and regarded as approximate. The Zaporozhian Cossack host of some 10,000-20,000 was dispersed, part of it fleeing to Ottoman territory to found the Danubian Sich.
Share of the population affected
32%
of the population of the Crimean Khanate on the eve of Russian annexation, together with the Zaporozhian Host, 1783
Territory
27,000 km²
The Crimean Khanate — the Crimean peninsula (about 26,100 km2) together with the Kuban and the steppe north of the Black Sea — was annexed by the Russian Empire in April 1783; the Zaporozhian lands were absorbed into New Russia and granted to Russian and foreign colonists.
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What happened
In June 1775 Russian troops surrounded and razed the Zaporozhian Sich, the fortified centre of the Cossack host on the lower Dnieper, dissolving its autonomy and opening the steppe to state-directed colonisation; part of the host fled to Ottoman territory. In 1778-1779 the government removed the Khanate's Christian population — some 31,000 Greeks and Armenians — to the Azov coast, where they founded Mariupol and Nakhichevan-on-Don, a measure intended both to protect co-religionists and to strip the khan of his tax base. The Khanate, nominally independent since 1774, was annexed outright in April 1783. Emigration of Crimean Tatars to the Ottoman Empire followed in waves; the much larger exodus of 1856-1866 is treated separately in the atlas. The episode fills the gap between the atlas's Russian eastward expansion entry, which ends around 1750, and the nineteenth-century Caucasus and Crimean entries.
Parties
Catherine II's government destroyed the Zaporozhian Sich, deported Crimea's Greek and Armenian population to the Azov coast, and annexed the Crimean Khanate
Disputed
Whether the 1778 removal of the Christians is best read as protection, as economic warfare against the Khanate, or as forced deportation; Russian, Greek, Armenian and Crimean Tatar historiographies weight these differently.
The denominator
Ottoman and early Russian administrative counts are fragmentary; Alan Fisher's reconstruction puts the Khanate at roughly 300,000-500,000 people, of whom about 31,000 Greeks and Armenians were deported to the Azov coast in 1778, with the Zaporozhian Sich adding some 50,000 Cossacks and dependants before its destruction in 1775. Crimean Tatar emigration to Ottoman lands after 1783 removed a further large share, variously estimated at 80,000-100,000 in the first decade.
The affected figure sums three distinct groups - deported Christians, emigrating Crimean Tatars and dispersed Cossacks - drawn from partly overlapping territories, so the ratio is approximate.
Where the baseline comes from
On the death toll
There was no massacre. Deaths arose from the winter march of the deported Christians and from the first years on the unprepared Azov steppe, where contemporary Greek accounts report heavy mortality; no count was made. The destruction of the Sich was accomplished with little bloodshed.
Documented forms of violence
Destruction of Property
Russian military correspondence and the resettlement registers record the razing of the Sich and the abandonment of Greek and Armenian property in Crimea.
Movements mapped
- Crimean Greeks and Armenians deported to Mariupol and the Azov coast31,000
- Zaporozhian Cossacks fleeing to the Ottoman Danube delta
Countries touched, on present-day borders
Russia, Ukraine, Romania
Sources
This entry rests only on reference, press or open-edited sources. Treat its figures as indicative and follow the links before relying on them.