Migrations and Resettlement of the Gagauz in 20th – 21st Centuries

Abstract

For the last decade of the USSR era and the 25-years history of independent states on the post-soviet territory, the main feature of the Gagauz resettlement transformation was a steady tendency, with growing dynamics, for ethnos dispersion, growing number of Gagauz people who lived beyond the traditional geographical range in Budzhak, and increasing dispersion of their resettlement. The major factor of the change in the geography of the Gagauz resettlement is the centrifugal nature of migrations, where the Russian vector has been their predominant destination until recently. Under the influence of the most difficult destructive factors – the socio-economic crisis in Moldova generally and in Gagauzia in particular, unemployment, poverty, and social stratification of the population – the Gagauz population, in order to adapt to the new demands of the social medium, choose an active migration strategy for itself, which allowed them to avoid poverty, compensate for a dramatic decline in income, and to survive physically. Labor migrations that had been taking for many years, finally turning into emigration, the growing level of potential migration, including that of female Gagauz population, migrational sentiment typical of educated Gagauz youth, increasing orientation at leaving the republic temporarily or permanently – all of these in the situation of the started crisis in reconstructive processes among the Gagauz population, creates a serious threat of lowering the demographic, social and intellectual potential of the Gagauz society (particularly, dangerous in its consequences for numerically insignificant peoples), the destruction of socio-cultural identity of the Gagauz people, and the dispersion of the Gagauz ethnos.

Keywords

• the gagauz
• migrations
• resettlement
• migration motives
• moldova
• russia
• gagauzia