Armenia

Ethnic Minorities

Figure 6. Ethnic Groups in Armenia

Ethnically the most homogeneous of the Soviet republics, Armenia had few problems with ethnic minorities during the Soviet period. According to the last Soviet census, conducted in 1989, Armenians made up 93.3 percent of Armenia's population, Azerbaijanis 2.6 percent, Russians 1.6 percent, and Muslim Kurds and Yezidi (Christian Kurds) together 1.7 percent. Fewer than 30,000 others, including Greeks and Ukrainians, lived in the republic in 1989. During the Soviet period, the republic's largest non-Armenian group was the Azerbaijanis. By 1989, however, almost all of the Azerbaijanis, who had numbered 161,000 in 1979, either had been expelled or had emigrated from Armenia (see fig. 6). The figure for the 1989 census included 77,000 Azerbaijanis who had returned to their native country but were still considered residents of Armenia.

Data as of March 1994