boundaries of newly independent Estonia was 7.3%. About half of these were indigenous ethnic Russians living in the Petseri (Pechory) district and east of Narva river ("Estonian Ingria"), in the two areas which had been added to Estonian territory according to the 1920 Peace Treaty of Tartu, but were transferred to the Russian SFSR in 1944. In the aftermath of World War I Estonia became an independent state where ethnic Russians established Cultural Self-Governments according to the 1925 Estonian Law on Cultural Autonomy. The state was tolerant of the Russian Orthodox Church and became a home to many Russian émigrés after the Russian Revolution in 1917. World War II and the Soviet occupation After the Occupation and annexation of the Baltic states by the Soviet Union in 1940, repression of both ethnic Estonians and ethic Russians followed. According to Sergei Isakov, almost all societies, newspapers, organizations of ethnic Russians in Estonia were closed in 1940 and their activists persecuted. The country remained annexed to the Soviet Union until 1991, except for the period of Nazi German occupation between 1941 and 1944. During the era of Soviet occupation, the Soviet government maintained a program of replacing the indigenous Estonians with immigrants from the Soviet Union. In the course of violent population transfers, thousands of Estonian citizens were deported to the interior parts of Russia (mostly Siberia), and huge numbers of Russian-speaking Soviet citizens were encouraged to settle in Estonia. In the Ida-Viru and Harju Counties, cities such as Paldiski, Sillamäe, and Narva were ethnically cleansed and the indigenous Estonian population was totally replaced by Russian colonists. As a result of Soviet occupation, the Russian population in Estonia grew from about 23,000 people in 1945 to 475,000 in 1991, and other Russian-speaking population to 551,000, constituting 35% of the total population at its peak. In 1939 ethnic Russians had comprised 8% of the population; however, following the annexation of about of land by the Russian SFSR in January 1945, including Ivangorod (then the eastern suburb of Narva) and the Petseri County, Estonia lost most of its inter-war ethnic Russian population. Of the estimated 20,000 Russians remaining in Estonia, the majority belonged to the historical community of Old Believers. Most of the present-day Russians in Estonia are recent migrants and their descendants who settled in during the Soviet occupation between 1945 and 1991. After the Soviet Union occupied and annexed Estonia, Latvia and