THE BALTIC PROVINCES
In some ways the Baltic provinces, Estonia, Livonia, and Kurland (modern-day Estonia and Latvia) were more profoundly affected by the evolution of state and society in the Russian Empire than other non-Russian European areas.1 Alexander I had abolished serfdom in the Baltic provinces in 1816–1819. The landless emancipation left the Estonian and Latvian peasants still the sharecroppers or tenants of the German nobility, and frequently still obligated to perform labor services, but the emancipation did begin the process of modernization. The role of the Baltic provinces as ports of entry to the Russian Empire made Riga a major commercial and eventually industrial center by the end of the nineteenth century. At the same time the restoration of Baltic noble privileges under Paul I meant that the provincial assemblies of nobles – all of them Germans – and the restoration of traditional forms of city government meant that effective control of the area remained in the hands of the nobility and the German city patriciate. The noble assemblies were freely elected, and worked directly with the tsar, often bypassing the Russian governors, the only representatives of the central government in the area. These were free institutions of a type that did not exist in the rest of the empire (except Finland), but their existence perpetuated the rule of an ethnically distinct nobility over the rural population.
The persistence of the autonomous noble institutions and the freedom of the peasants meant that the effects of the reforms of the 1860s were different in the Baltic provinces from the rest of the empire. For the peasants the great issue was not their legal status but access to land ownership, granted only in the 1860s. The press flourished and was much less restricted than in the rest of the empire as a result of the local legal system. Latvian and Estonian journals and newspapers appeared beside the older German press, providing a forum for political debate as well as cultural and national polemics. There had always been minorities of Latvian and Estonian artisans and small traders in the towns, and the economic development of the area led to a rapid flow of population from the countryside into the city, so that by the end of the nineteenth century the Germans were a minority in the cities. At the same time the spread of education, as elsewhere in the empire, gave rise to an educated class among the Baltic peoples, and voluntary cultural societies carried national ideas to the Latvians and Estonians. For these emergent nationalities the Germans, not the Russian tsar or the Russian people, were still the enemy. Indeed Russian Slavophiles thought that the imperial government should encourage the Latvians and Estonians against the Germans, but the conservative pro-nobility policies of St. Petersburg, as well as the excellent court connections of the Baltic nobles, prevented the full emergence of such a tactic by the Russian authorities.
All of these changes led to conflict between St. Petersburg and the Baltic nobility, but the local noble assemblies continued to exist and function, and in the countryside the German nobility was still completely dominant. Most of them continued to serve in the Russian army and administration and particularly the aristocratic elite remained loyal to the Empire. The existence of the new united Germany after 1870 provided an attraction for some, but on the whole the reliance on the nobility in the area was a largely successful policy in the Baltic provinces. The situation began to change only after 1900, when social changes and national movements brought the Latvian and Estonian majorities onto the front stage of society and politics. And they were not nobles.
FINLAND
Like the Baltic provinces, Finland retained autonomous institutions until the end of the empire, but these institutions and Finnish society were otherwise quite different from the Baltic provinces. Finland, in the words of Alexander I, had been “raised to the rank of nations” by the Russian annexation of 1809. No longer was it merely the eastern extension of Sweden with an exotic language spoken by peasants, but it was a country of its own under the Russian tsar. Alexander had also granted Finland the continuation of the laws and Lutheran religion from the Swedish time, a separate government in Helsinki, and a legislature modeled on the old Swedish diet. Unlike the situation in the Baltic provinces, Finnish peasants had never been serfs but were free tenants and freeholders, and the Finnish diet continued the Swedish practice of including peasant representatives.
Thus the Russian tsars at first could rely in Finland on the loyalty of the Swedish-speaking nobility for they found that the nobility lacked both the antagonism to Russian rule of the Polish nobles and the caste egotism of the Baltic Germans. Indeed for much of the century the Russian tsars looked favorably on Finnish economic development, state building, and emerging national consciousness. The generally peaceful relationship was not wholly untroubled, for Nicholas I never called the Finnish diet to meet. The local government in Helsinki remained in power, carrying out numerous educational and economic projects with the support of the Russian governors-general and the Finnish State Secretariat in St. Petersburg (usually headed by a Finn). The establishment of a university in Helsinki not only raised the cultural level of the country but also provided a center for an emerging national culture in both Swedish and Finnish that affirmed national dignity while maintaining loyalty to the empire. Perhaps the most important result was Elias Lönnrot’s compilation of Finnish folkore, the Kalevala, most of it collected among the Finnish-speaking peasantry of northern Russia rather than in Finland itself. Finnish rapidly became a literary language alongside Swedish, though the latter remained the primary language of administration until the end of the Russian Empire. As the 1809 agreement added the Finnish territories taken by Peter the Great to the rest of Finland, the border ran almost to St. Petersburg itself. Thus only a few hours from his capital, the Russian tsar became a constitutional monarch. Finnish law remained separate from that of the rest of the empire, with the result that Russian revolutionaries could hide in Finland without legal obstacles to their activities.
The Crimean War brought some destruction to Finland, as the British navy shelled and burned a number of coastal towns, though no bombardment could knock out the great fort of Sveaborg in the Helsinki harbor. Finland repeatedly demonstrated its loyalty, and was rewarded in the reform era that followed. As in the rest of the empire, the end of the Crimean War meant a radical relaxation of censorship and a new economic policy oriented toward capitalist development. Economic development and reform brought newspapers and public opinion to Finland as well, and political groupings began to form. The decisive change came in 1863 when Tsar Alexander called the Finnish diet into session, an elected legislature that represented “estates” (nobility, townspeople, clergy, and peasants), not the country as a whole since the franchise was sharply restricted. The peasants were overwhelmingly Finnish speakers, and the tsar recognized their needs the same year, mandating that petitions and other documents to the administration could be presented in Finnish as well as Swedish (Russian was not contemplated). The Finnish peasant deputies, all firm supporters of the Finnish language, were the tsar’s main allies in Finland, against the mostly Swedish-speaking liberals among the urban and noble deputies.
Inclusion in the Russian Empire created a new economic situation for Finland, as St. Petersburg was an enormous market for labor and goods. In the early nineteenth century more Finns lived in St. Petersburg than in any Finnish city, and the Finnish countryside provided an increasingly large proportion of the capital’s food supply. The more rapid development of the Russian interior after the emancipation and the construction of railroads only speeded the integration of Finland into the empire’s economy, as textile mills and metalworking plants provided products for the seemingly unlimited Russian market. Thus businessmen as well as nobles had an interest in preserving a stable autonomy within the empire. This success story only came to an end with the attempt at “Russification” by governor-general N. I. Bobrikov in 1896–1902. Bobrikov decided that Finland needed to be further integrated into the empire, a goal shared by Tsar Nicholas II. Bobrikov’s actual measures were rather limited (use of Russian by high officials, a threat to draft Finns to the Russian army) and most of them remained on paper, but they were enough to create a crisis without actually advancing Russian rule in the country. The result was the emergence of radical nationalist groups and dissension among the nobility and business classes. Finland retained almost all its autonomous rights up to 1917, but Nicholas II and Bobrikov had succeeded in alienating large sections of the population, including the elites.