People living in the Autonomous Republic of Karelia in Russia speak five Baltic Finnish languages: Veps, Lude, and three forms of Karelian—Livvi or Onega, South, and Viena (Dvina) or White Sea Karelian. The Izhor
(inkeroiset) population (consisting of around 1,000 people living in Ingria on the south coast of the Gulf of Finland) speaks a Karelian-related language.
Tver, Novgorod, and Pihkova Karelians are descendants of Orthodox refugees who escaped from Karelian and Ingrian territories around Lake Ladoga to remote settlements throughout Russia after the signing of the Stolbova Treaty of 1617, which allowed Sweden to annex the province of Ingria. This exodus left space for Lutheran settlers entering from Savo (savakot) and Karelia (äyrämöiset). Lutheran identity became one of the main features of Ingrians, who endured Siberian exile after World War II, then relocated to Karelia, Estonia, and the district of St. Petersburg, and since 1990 to Finland, where around 25,000 Ingrians have entered as returnees. Today, their total population numbers around 100,000.
Throughout the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, violent religiously based transfers, Russian colonization, and Soviet deportation policies kept the Karelian portion of the population small wherever Karelians lived.
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