Russia established a protectorate over the Crimean khanate in 1774 after a brutal campaign in which cities were razed and thousands killed. Initially Russia allowed the last Girey khan, Sahin, to endure under watchful eye, but his machinations forced Russia to take direct control in 1783. Despite being in the midst of standardizing administrative reforms, here Catherine II maintained a politics of difference. In the newly named Tauride province the rights, tax privileges, and landownership of the Tatar elites and other groups (Greeks, Wallachians, Armenians) were affirmed. Islamic schools and courts were maintained. Crimean Tatars were exempted from the poll tax and conscription. Confessional rights of Islam were affirmed with the creation in 1791 of the Tauride Muslim Spiritual Authority. Like the Orenburg Muslim Spiritual Authority created in 1788 for the Middle Volga and Urals, the Tauride Authority was intended as a supervisory body over institutions of the faith and as a liaison with Russia. In the Crimea it was particularly charged to monitor itinerant Islamic mullahs suspected of rousing up pro-Ottoman sympathies. As in Orenburg, the Tauride Authority was headed by a newly created senior hierarch (mufti) and religious hierarchy where none had existed before.
Despite these many pragmatic accommodations, the area's population suffered tremendous out-migration from the 1780s. Even before annexation in 1783, Russia moved most of the peninsula's Christian urban population of Armenians and Greeks (over 30,000 people) to towns on the Azov Sea and most of the Nogai Tatars to the Kuban steppe to form a Cossack Host; at the same time over 200,000 Tatars left for the Ottoman empire. Tatar out-migration continued at the time of annexation and after the Turkish war of 1787-92, when thousands more left, alienated by Russian steps during the war to disarm Crimean Tatars. Kelly O'Neill argues that the process of "integrating" Crimea into the Russian empire proceeded somewhat differently here than elsewhere in the empire because of Crimean Tatars' close identification with their co-religionists in the Ottoman empire; proximity and cultural connection meant that many simply did not make the effort to join the Russian imperial nobility, as Cossacks, Baltic Germans, Georgians, Poles, and others had done. Those who did stay, however, strove to preserve their political dominance. When the 1785 Charter to the Nobility came to Crimea, the Tatar mirza elite was initially equated with the Russian nobility and their landholding rights affirmed regardless of wealth. Initially nearly 5,000 members of the mirza elite enrolled as "nobles" in their local associations. When Russian policy across the empire tightened up on standards of proof, in part to keep the numbers of non- Russian elites (Ukrainian, German, Polish, Crimean) from overtaking Russians, officials took a second look. By the 1820s, the number of mirza families officially granted noble status had been restricted to fewer than 100.
Still, Tatars dominated in the peninsula. Initially Russia created a model of civil and administrative rule by native intermediaries in the Crimean Land Government, led by a governor from a leading family and a board of mirzy and overseen by the Russian-appointed military governor for fiscal and security issues. Within a year, in 1784, this structure was dissolved with the introduction of the 1775 Russian administrative reforms. This system, which relied on local nobles being elected to staff the dozens of new civil and judicial offices, resulted in a generous participation of elite Tatars in office. While, as Kelly O'Neill showed, Tatar mirzy held only about 15 percent of very high, appointed offices, they gained over 80 percent of district level offices, thereby maintaining their dominance in governing this multiethnic community. By 1802 Russia had limited Tatars to district level to open up more opportunity for Russian, Greek, Armenian, and other elites. Russia also co- opted Crimean Tatars by enlisting them in a voluntary Light Horse Regiment with land and salaries, attached to the Russian army as irregulars like a Cossack Host. Russia deployed them in the Polish and Napoleonic wars but cautiously did not send this regiment against the Ottomans.
Governor-General Potemkin tried to balance Tatar authority with the in-migration of hundreds of state peasants and Orthodox clergymen from Russian- and Ukrainian-speaking areas into Crimea; foreigners also arrived—Moldavians and Wallachians, Swedes, Poles and Germans, Greeks, Bulgarians and Corsicans, a Mennonite community. All enjoyed differential rights and privileges. Russia even advertised in Europe for traders and craftsmen to replace the urban populace that had left and to restore local viticulture, sericulture, animal husbandry, and other enterprises. Most settled on the steppe north of the peninsula, leaving Tatars in control on the peninsula. In absolute numbers the Tatar population had been cut in half, but by 1795 it still constituted about 75 percent of the population, with Russians about 4 percent and many other ethnic groups (Greeks, Armenians, Ukrainians, and Jews) constituting around 2 percent each. Tatars were forced to engage in the empire's multi-ethnic governance institutions, but they were still dominant in their homeland.
THE BALTICS
When Russia won Livonia (Estland and Livland) from Sweden (de facto in 1710, affirmed by the Treaty of Nystadt in 1721), it acquired lands with robust European social and political structures originating in the thirteenth-century capture of these Latvian and Estonian lands by German-speaking Catholic Knights. When the Teutonic (based in Prussia) and Livonian Knights secularized in the sixteenth century, they set off decades of warfare between Sweden, the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania, and Russia over this valuable Baltic littoral. The Livonian War (1558-83) was disastrous for Russia (embroiled in Ivan IVs Oprichnina 1564-72), but a great success for Sweden, which won Estland (the bulk of modern-day Estonia) with capital at Reval/Tallinn (Figure 5.1) and major port at Narva. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth kept control of the Latvian-speaking lands of Livland and Courland until 1629, when Sweden captured them, with the capital at Riga and major city at Dorpat (Tartu, Iur'ev).
Figure 5.1 The sixteenth-century bell tower, long the highest spire in the city, of the town hall of Reval (Tallinn) stands on a foundation going back to the thirteenth century. It is said to be the oldest town hall in Scandinavia and the Baltics. Photo: Jack Kollmann.
Under the minimal oversight of a Swedish governor, the two provinces of Estland and Livland essentially maintained their historical status quo through the seventeenth century. German-speaking, Lutheran noblemen ruled in a communal assembly (Landtag) and twelve-man executive committee of Landrats. German nobles staffed the judicial system, using German provincial law codified in 1740 (but never ratified by the Senate). The nobility formed a closed, exclusive landed elite, their privileges codified in charters from Poland and later Sweden. Even though peasants were not enserfed in Sweden, under Swedish rule Latvian and Estonian serfdom was maintained. Terms, however, were not as harsh as they were becoming in Russia: under Swedish law peasants had recourse to Swedish courts and could sell their surplus product. Swedish rule also benefited the Baltic peasantry with native-language elementary schools mandated for each parish in 1686. Intellectual life was rich: colleges had been founded at Riga (1566), Vilnius (1579), and Dorpat/Tartu (1583) in the Counter-Reformation; under the Swedes Dorpat was upgraded to a university in 1632.
Peter I launched the Great Northern War precisely to win a Baltic presence, founding his new capital of St. Petersburg in 1703 on Swedish land. The war years were devastating here; famine (1696-7, 1709-10) and plague (1710) halved the population by the 1710s (the population rebounded, more than doubling by the 1790s). Population loss was exacerbated by mass deportations from Dorpat and rural Livonia in 1708; Russia also closed down the University of Dorpat until 1802 in consolidating control. After aggressive moves of conquest, Russia adopted its typical policy of maintaining diversity: it affirmed the rights and institutions of the German nobility and reversed a Swedish campaign of land reclamation that had alienated Baltic noblemen; it affirmed the rights of Magdeburg Law municipalities; it maintained serfdom. Andrejs Plakans calls this Baltics policy "permissive autocracy."