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A demographic history of Transnistria shows that actual Transnistria has been home to numerous ethnic groups, in varying proportions, over time. Until the early 19th century, it was sparsely populated. In the last centuries most of the population is Romanian/Moldavian. During WWII some 250,000 Jews perished in Tansnistria, where they had been herded by Rumanian Nazis and their German allies. There they were left at the mercy of hunger and disease until liberation by the Red Army. == Ethnicity prior to 1792 == The word "Transnistria" means literally ''lands beyond the Dniester river'' (this river is called "Nistru" in Romanian/Moldavian) and these lands are historically related to the neo-Latin populations that lived east of Bessarabia. Indeed, actual Transnistria is only a small area of these lands, and the most western: Transnistria historically reached during World War II the Bug river, while ethnic Moldavians/Romanians moved to live even near the Don river in 1712. In the coastal area of these lands, during the Roman empire there were small cities of nearly 5,000 inhabitants like Tyras and Olbia, where Roman colonists settled under the protection of Roman legionaries. The interior was sparsely populated by barbarians and for many reasons all the region between the Dniester and the Bug river for centuries -during the Middle Ages- remained a nearly desert steppe, continuously raided by invasions. Beside the droughty periods typical for the region, the second reason for the underpopulation of the Black Sea northern shores is the vicinity of the Tatars. Their presence, both military and civil, impeded the settling of the east European type life and blocked the Moldavian or even Polish expansion to the east. The Transnistrian lands settled in the Middle Ages by Romanians were only partially and temporarily ruled by Moldavian princes or possessions of the Moldavian Principality. Probably those Moldavians living east of the Dniester were only a few thousands. The steppe around the Bug river was mostly depopulated in the 13th and 14th centuries because of the Golden Horde, according to some travelers (like in the "Chorographia Moldaviae" of Georg Reicherstorfer, written in 1541). They found there only some Vlach shepherds and a few Moldavian and Slav villages. Meanwhile, the Romanian/Moldavian colonization east of Bessarabia -that had started around the year 1000 AD- had reached the Kiev area in the 15th century and in 1712 even the Don river, with the Dimitrie Cantemir leadership〔(Map showing Romanian/Vlach colonists in Ukraine )〕 Ethnically the area of Transnistria between the Dniester and the Bug river -even if depopulated- was probably 2/3 moldavian speaking (while between the Bug and the Dnieper most of the population was slav), when Russia started to conquest it. Indeed, according to the results of the census (quoted in Romanian sources) of 1793 AD, 49 villages out of 67 between the Dniester and the Bug were Romanian.〔E. Lozovan, Romanii orientali...(Eastern Romanians...), ,,Neamul Romanesc”, 1/1991, p.32. via (Vlachs/Romanians east of the Dniester river and up to the Bug river area )〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Demographic history of Transnistria」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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