Two agencies from St. Petersburg ruled the Baltics, one judicial (the College of Justice for Livland, Finland, and Estland Affairs) with five members, most of whom were Baltic Germans, a procurator and staff, and a financial office (Kontora for Livland, Finland, and Estland Affairs) whose senior members were also Baltic Germans. Locally, Russian control sat lightly. Russian-appointed governors-general rarely resided in the Baltics, and their lieutenants were elected by local noblemen. The Livland and Estland nobility in the 1720s-40s created restrictive registers of the noble estate to preserve their power. Nobles monopolized office: local courts and police courts were staffed by elected local nobles, with appeal to the Landtag. Over the century they intensified demands on their peasants for labor and service.
Russia also acquired in 1710 rural areas in Finland north of St. Petersburg, which became the Vyborg gubernia of five districts where a judge appointed from local nobles staffed local courts, working with elected peasant assessors. An appeals venue was provided by a circuit court appointed by the Senate. Three languages—Russian, Swedish, and German—were used in public life in these Finnish territories.
The linguistic diversity of the Vyborg lands was characteristic of the entire Baltic region, particularly since the influence of the Reformation encouraged the development of the vernacular. In Livland and Estland, German was the language of political control, but Latvian and Estonian peasantry (Figure 5.2) benefited not only from the continuation of native-language elementary schools but also from the spread of literacy. Translations into the vernacular abounded: a full Estonian Bible was published in 1739, as well as other publications in Estonian and Latvian. The religious movement of the Moravian Brethren or Herrnhuters gained popularity from the 1730s. A Pietistic strain of Lutheranism, it preached sobriety, order, and the dignity of the individual and encouraged literacy and even spiritual writing by all Christians. Alarmed at the competition, the Lutheran Church asked Empress Elizabeth to suppress the Herrnhuters, which she did in 1743. Catherine II permitted the movement again in 1764 and it persisted as a pietistic parallel to Lutheranism.
Intellectual life in the Baltics flourished with tight connections to the Polish- Lithuanian Commonwealth and German towns of Prussia. By the eighteenth century a recognizable group of public intellectuals emerged, generally men of noble background who had been educated in German (Gottingen, Rostock, Halle, Leipzig, Jena) and other European universities (Leiden in Holland) in the spirit of the Enlightenment. Returning to Livonia and Estonia, some wrote works condemning serfdom and proposing earnest plans for agrarian and social reform, to concerted opposition from local nobility. The Riga publishing house of Hartknoch was a center of German Enlightenment publishing. In addition to German- language tracts, these literati also published in the vernacular. Johann Gottfried Herder, whose later philological and literary studies crystallized the concept of the German nation, taught in Riga in the 1760s and there began to develop his
Figure 5.2 Estonian peasant farms are preserved at the Estonian Open Air Museum outside of Tallinn (historical Reval). Photo: Jack Kollmann.
thinking about the "folk" and the collective spirit of ethnicity and culture. In Riga Herder collected and later published Estonian and Latvian folk songs. Others continued his collecting and publishing of Latvian and Estonian folklore, songs, and tales, as well as of Latvian grammars and dictionaries and ethnographic encyclopedias of Livland and Estland. Plakans suggests that over 220 works in Estonian were published in the eighteenth century, and in Latvian about 700 between 1755 and 1835. As he points out, however, by the end of the century in revolutionary times all this attention to educating the peasantry prompted suspicion in official and noble quarters, and in some areas (particularly non-Protestant pockets of the Baltics), education for peasants was scaled back.
Peter and his successors valued Baltic Germans in imperial service; over 3,000 were allowed to study in German universities in the eighteenth century, and a large minority of the Russian empire's senior public servants (one-eighth between 1710 and 1917) were Baltic Germans. Peter I modeled some of his administrative reforms on the Baltic model and its Swedish forebears, particularly urban institutions and the elected noble Landrat in provincial government. Catherine II drew on the Baltic German judicial model for the 1775 administrative reforms, a major thrust of which in the Russian center was to enhance noble participation in local government.
The implementation of these reforms in the Baltics undermined regional autonomy. Despite, or perhaps because of Baltic Germans' responses to the Legislative Commission in 1767, where they resisted any effort to be put under empire-wide law, deeming their local laws and privileges sufficient and superior, Catherine II strove to integrate Livland and Estland's fiscal systems and noble institutions into a new imperial standard. When in the 1780s Russia introduced in the Baltics the 1775 administrative reforms—gubernia board, procuracy, and judicial and fiscal chambers at local and gubernia levels, with elected noble officials and peasant representatives at the lower level—these institutions were designed to include non-Germans and non-nobles. Even state peasants were allowed to be assessors in local courts. An assembly of nobles of all ethnicities was instituted. The head tax and recruitment were imposed.
In 1787 the Charters to Nobilities and to Towns were introduced to the Baltics, further undermining German exclusivity. The urban charter created a hierarchy of merchants, shopkeepers, and craftsmen based on property, not social and ethnic origin. Opening up the tariff barrier between Estland and Livland and the rest of the empire in 1782 also helped break the monopoly of German merchants and enliven Riga trade. The Charter to Nobility opened up more access to office and landholding for Russian, Polish, and other non-German nobles. Nevertheless, German nobles continued to dominate the administrative system and Russian was used only at the gubernia level, with local laws and German still in use at the local level. In Vyborg, as John LeDonne points out, paradoxically the reform put more power in the hands of locally elected landholders and diminished the existing role of peasant assessors. Nevertheless, Swedish persisted in those courts into the 1790s. Baltic Germans lost institutions, but they maintained great local power and cohesion and seamlessly flowed into the imperial nobility and officialdom, the creation of which had been one of Catherine II's goals.
Not the nobility but the lower townsmen and peasantry suffered most from Catherinian reforms in the Baltics. Replacing an outmoded land-based tax system, the Russian poll tax was introduced for Livonian peasants and townsmen in 1783; tax registration formalized serf status even more firmly than before. Despite a peasant uprising the burden remained, and under Paul I Livonian and Finnish peasants were made subject to conscription, joining some Middle Volga people as one of the few non-Slavic peasantries of the empire required to pay these two classic burdens of East Slavic peasants.