Mapping of transformation processes in the ethnodemographic space of the Crimea

Abstract

The article presents and summarizes the results of mapping transformational processes in the demographic and ethno-confessional space of the Crimea. Map plots reflect the options for visualizing data on demographic, ethnic and religious processes in the Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol over the past decades. The maps illustrate the dynamics of the population size and density, its natural movement, the balance of migration, marriage and divorce, territorial features of the settlement of large and small ethnic groups of the Crimea, the placement of religious buildings and religious communities on its territory. Maps of rural settlement and the appearance of villages with endangered populations were created and analyzed. The types of dynamics of demographic, ethnic and confessional situations in the Crimea are determined. The analysis of the peculiarities of the dynamics of the ethnodemographic space of the Crimea during the change of its political subjectivity is carried out. The main spatial patterns of the processes that form the modern portrait of the population of the Crimean Peninsula are revealed. The conclusion is made about the possibility of cartographic study of the demographic and ethno-confessional specifics of the territory after preliminary differentiation of socio-cultural processes within its boundaries into large-scale and local ones. This allows us to clarify not only the spatial, but also the essential markers of their occurrence. In modern Crimea, large-scale transformational socio-cultural processes should include all the reproductive and migration changes that are the result of demographic breakdowns that began in the 1990s. The processes of changing its ethnic and confessional spaces should be considered local in Crimea. Their mapping revealed the narrowing nature of such a phenomenon as the polyethnicity of the territory of the Crimean Peninsula. Cartographic study of socio-cultural processes in the Crimea confirmed the author’s hypothesis that the Crimean regional community has not completed the process of post-Soviet transformation and continues to support the development trends established at the end of the twentieth century.