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The Russian era (1710/95-1918)Page 1 of 2
Introduction Estonia and Livonia were subjected to circumstances under Russian rule which were very different from those later experienced by Lithuania and Courland – while Courland, in turn, was subject to conditions which differed from those in Lithuania. In 1710/21, Estonia and Livonia with Reval/Tallinn and Riga fell to the tsarist empire, after having been under Swedish rule for one and a half centuries (as far as the Estonia of that time is meant, which corresponds to the northern part of present-day Estonia) or else three-quarters of a century – a change of regime which resulted from a dispute between two foreign major powers. Wilna/Vilnius came under Russian rule as late as 1795 following the third partition of Poland-Lithuania, which had previously been a sovereign state with its own history as a major power. The considerable, historically rooted, differences between the northern and southern Baltic regions became gradually less pronounced after they were incorporated into the tsarist empire, albeit only slowly at first. This process nonetheless proved to be decisive for the fate of the region, because Russian rule forced the Baltic peoples to develop a sort of common identity which is still to be seen today. Privileges and their decline in the northern Baltic region, repression in Lithuania Now referred to as the ‘Baltic governorates’, Livonia, Estonia and (from 1795) Courland acquired a special status within the tsarist empire. On the one hand, they were small in terms of territory and population and situated on the western periphery of the empire; on the other hand, their position on the Baltic Sea meant that they were in a key position for trade between Europe and Russia. Above all, they had reached a level of economic and cultural development that surpassed that of Russia. At first, the tsars and tsarinas attempted to take advantage of the situation in the interest of the empire as a whole, and therefore intervened very little in the conditions prevailing in the newly acquired provinces. The German Balts therefore enjoyed considerable privileges in Riga and Reval/Tallinn, or else quickly regained such privileges in cases where – as under Catherine the Great – they had been limited for some years. However, western and central Europe had been rapidly developing politically since the French Revolution and economically since the industrial revolution, which meant that the more Russia fell behind western and central Europe as they became more and more modernised in the course of the 19th century, and the more the peoples of the Baltic region experienced a national awakening (combined with the eager discovery of their languages, for example), the more the Russian government felt obliged to implement a strict policy of Russification. Repressive measures were undertaken in Lithuania and Wilna/Vilnius: the fact that people there had taken part in the major Polish uprisings of the 19th century resulted in the closure of the university in 1830 and, in 1863, in the prohibition of any printed materials written in Lithuanian with the Roman alphabet, a ruling that remained in place for four decades. It is still possible to visit the prison where intellectuals were incarcerated at that time, in the Basilian monastery. In this context, it is hardly surprising that Poles and Latvians (and, to a lesser extent, Lithuanians and Estonians) took part in the revolution of 1905, or that the Baltic peoples strove for independence when German troops forced the Russians to retreat during World War I. The Germans began negotiations with the aim of enabling the Poles and Lithuanians to found their own states, although the Lithuanians were initially expected to work in close cooperation with Germany and to crown an ethnic German as their monarch. Almost two centuries of Russian rule in the Baltic region had come to an end. |
