The population of Russians in Estonia is estimated at 320,000, most of whom live in the urban areas of Harju and Ida-Viru counties. The Estonian name for Russians vene, estonia free dating site derives from an old Germanic loan veneð referring to the Wends, speakers of a Slavic language who lived on the southern coast of the Baltic sea. 1061 when the Kievans were driven out by the tribe of Sosols.
A medieval proto-Russian settlement was in Kuremäe, Vironia. The Orthodox community in the area built a church in the 16th century and in 1891 the Pühtitsa Convent was created on its site. In 1217, an allied Ugaunian-Novgorodian army defended the Ugaunian stronghold of Otepää from the German knights. Orthodox churches and small communities of proto-Russian merchants and craftsmen remained in Livonian towns as did close trade links with the Novgorod Republic and the Pskov and Polotsk principalities.
The beginning of continuous Russian settlement in what is now Estonia dates back to the late 17th century when several thousand Russian Old Believers, escaping religious persecution in Russia, settled in areas then a part of the Swedish empire near the western coast of Lake Peipus. A relatively larger number of ethnic Russian workers settled in Tallinn and Narva during the period of rapid industrial development at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. After the First World War, the share of ethnic Russians in the population of independent Estonia was 7. Cultural Self-Governments according to the 1925 Estonian Law on Cultural Autonomy. The majority of the pre-war Russian population in Estonia lived in border areas that were annexed by the Russian SFSR in 1944. Petseri County, Estonia lost most of its inter-war ethnic Russian population. Most of the present-day Russians in Estonia are recent migrants and their descendants who settled in during the Soviet occupation between 1945 and 1991.
Ribbentrop Pact, the Soviet Union occupied and annexed the Baltic States in 1940. After the war, Narva’s inhabitants previously evacuated by the Germans were for the most part not permitted to return and were replaced by refugees and workers administratively mobilized from western Russia, Belarus and Ukraine. By 1989, ethnic Russians made up 30. During the Singing Revolution, the Intermovement, International Movement of the Workers of the ESSR, organised the indigenous Russian resistance to the independence movement and purported to represent the ethnic Russians and other Russophones in Estonia. Today most Russians live in Tallinn and the major northeastern cities of Narva, Kohtla-Järve, Jõhvi, and Sillamäe. The rural areas are populated almost entirely by ethnic Estonians, except for Lake Peipus coast, which has a long history of Old Believers communities.
