The colonization was generated by the need to better exploit the resources of the land, and by the absence of serfdom in Bessarabia. German colonists from Switzerland (canton Lausanne), France, and Germany (Württemberg) settled in 27 localities (most newly settled) in Budjak, and by 1856 Bessarabian Germans were 42,216. Russian veterans of the 1828–1829 war with the Ottomans were settled in 10 localities in Budjak, and three other localities were settled by Cossacks from Dobrudja (which got there from the Dniepr region some 50 years earlier). Bessarabian Bulgarians and Gagauz arrived from modern eastern Bulgaria as early as the second half of the 18th century. In 1817, they numbered 482 families in 12 localities, in 1856 – 115,000 people in 43 localities. Ukrainians had arrived Bessarabia since before 1812, and already in the 1820s they made up one third of the population of the most northern Hotin county. In the following decades more Ukrainians settled throughout the northern part of Bessarabia from Galicia and Podolia. Jews from Galicia, Podolia and Poland also settled in Bessarabia in the 19th century, but mostly in the cities and fairs; in some of these they eventually became a plurality. In 1856, there were 78,751 Bessarabian Jews and according to the Imperial Russian census of 1897, the capital Kishinev had a Jewish population of 50,000, or 46%, out of a total of approximately 110,000. There was even an attempt by the Russian authorities to create 16 Jewish agricultural colonies, where 10,589 people would settle. However within less than 2 generations, most of them sold the land to the local Moldavians and moved to the cities and fairs. The various population movements saw an increase of the Slavic population to more than a fifth of the total population by 1920, while the proportion of the Moldovan population steadily decreased. In absence of any official records on ethnic distribution until the late 19th century, various figures for the ethnic proportions of the region have been advanced. Thus, in the 1920s Romanian historian Ion Nistor alleged that, at the beginning of the Russian administration, Moldavians represented 86% of the population. While according to official statistics speakers of Moldovan and Romanian accounted for 47.8% in 1897, some authors proposed figures as high as 70% for the beginning of the 20th century.