Stavropol krai. An administrative district in the Russian Federation that encompasses the central portion of the Northern Caucasia region; Stavropol is its capital. The krai has an area of 66,160 sq km. It incorporates the historical Stavropol region; until 1992 it also incorporated the Karachai-Cherkess Autonomous oblast. Its population (1990) was 2,889,000, of whom 54 percent were urban dwellers. It has 34 raions, 22 cities, 17 towns (smt), and almost 300 villages. Census figures show that Ukrainians formed approximately 35 percent of the Stavropol krai population in 1926 but only 2.3 percent in 1979. A high degree of linguistic assimilation was indicated in the 1989 census, which showed that only 48.3 percent of the Ukrainians in the region claimed the Ukrainian language as their mother tongue.

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 5 (1993).]