REFORM AND RUSSIFICATION IN THE WESTERN BORDERLANDS, 1796-1855

Essentially, the Russian government's relations with the empire's borderlands is to be seen as an aspect of local government. Russia was an undergoverned country, and even in the Great Russian center of the empire the lack of appropriate institutions, the absence of satisfactory legal and administrative order, and the insufficient number of competent and trained officials made it difficult for the government to rule effectively outside St. Petersburg and the guberniia capitals. However, Russia, like other European states, often tried to impose her own religious and political norms on national and religious minorities living within her frontiers. This was particularly the case in the eastern borderlands and the left-bank Ukraine, where the local elites were either easily assimilated or had weakly developed institutions of self-government. In the western borderlands, on the other hand, the local administrative, legal, and social institutions often seemed to be superior to those of the Great Russian center. These institutions were the product of a long historical development that had permitted Polish szlachta, German burghers and nobles, and Swedish estates either to win new rights and privileges or to defend old ones in a secular struggle with relatively weak Polish or Swedish kings. Russia, a much more powerful monarchy than either Poland or Sweden, initially confirmed these rights and privileges because it was expedient for her to try to assure for herself the cooperation of the Polish, German, and Swedish upper classes in newly conquered areas during wars with Sweden and France in the eighteenth and at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Although no Russian ruler seems to have considered these promises to have been of the binding contractual nature assumed by certain Baltic German and Finnish publicists, a sufficient number of well-educated and competent borderland nobles performed useful services for the Russian state to incline Russian rulers up to Alexander III to confirm the autonomy and special rights of the upper classes in the western borderlands as long as they remained loyal to Russia. Furthermore, because Russian law was neither uniform nor codified before the 1830s and because there was a shortage of trained jurists and officials, defenders of local privileges easily found arguments against the wisdom of introducing Russian laws and institutions. Only after Russian society had been profoundly altered by the reforms of the sixties and seventies did it seem appropriate to proceed systematically with programs of Russification in the western borderlands.

Neither Russification nor the reforms of the 1860s and 1870s can be properly understood without some reference to earlier efforts to centralize and rationalize government and to apply in Russia what George Yaney has referred to as "legal-administrative system." These efforts affected the eastern borderlands of the empire and the left-bank Ukraine as early as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Baltic Provinces, Old Finland, and the lands acquired from Poland between 1772 and 1795 were brought directly under the supervision of the central government during the eighteenth century. Interference in the local affairs of the Baltic Provinces began in the mid-eighteenth century, when agents of the central government suggested the introduction of measures based on seventeenth-century Swedish legislation in order to increase government revenues and to protect Estonian and Latvian peasants from arbitrary treatment at the hands of their German masters. Catherine II, as is well known, viewed borderland privileges with particular suspicion and favored from the very beginning of her reign a basic "Russification" of their administration and political institutions. During the latter part of her reign Russian forms of taxation (especially the head tax) and the Russian guberniia, nobility, and town institutions provided for in the Provincial Reform of 1775 and the Charters to the Nobility and Towns of 1785 were introduced throughout the vast area that had been annexed from Poland and Sweden during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

In November and December of 1796 five decrees of Paul I set Livland, Estland, Old Finland, and the former Polish lands apart from the rest of the empire, declaring them to be gubernii administered on "special foundations according to their rights and privileges." But Paul believed, no less than did his mother Catherine, in the need to keep the provinces under the control and supervision of the central government and its agents. It was chiefly in the areas of strictly local affairs, courts, and the administration of law that he willingly permitted the western borderlands to deviate from the norms observed elsewhere in the empire. He continued to collect the head tax throughout this region, whereas in the Baltic Provinces he introduced the Russian recruitment system — something from which Estonian and Latvian peasants had been spared before 1796. In addition, despite Paul's restoration of privileges, governors-general, civil and military governors, boards of public welfare, and guberniia financial and treasury offices continued to represent the authority of the central government in the western borderlands on the basis of Catherine II's Provincial Reform of 1775.

After 1796, however, representatives of the authority of the central government in the western borderlands found it difficult to do anything that affected the interest of the local privileged estates without securing the cooperation of their assemblies of the nobility and town councils and of the German and Polish officials who took care of the everyday administrative, police, and court affairs of this area. To a considerable extent the administrative Russification undertaken by Catherine II seems to have been premature. Officials from the Great Russian center of the empire usually lacked the requisite knowledge and expertise to deal effectively with the local affairs of the western borderlands. This was especially the case in Belorussia, Lithuania and the right-bank Ukraine. In Estland and Livland the rapid introduction of the head tax and of Russian legislation and institutions that sometimes protected the rights of the lower classes disturbed the equilibrium of a traditional society based on hierarchically arranged estates.

The annexation of Finland in 1809 (augmented by Old Finland in 1812) and of Congress Poland in 1815 created another category of privileged provinces within the Russian Empire. Granting concessions to the wishes of the upper classes in Finland and Congress Poland was one way of securing their support during and immediately following the Napoleonic Wars. Traditional religions, laws, customs, and political institutions were retained, and the Russian Provincial Reform of 1775 was introduced in neither Finland nor in Congress Poland. Alexander I placed Finland directly under his own personal supervision and specifically instructed the Russian ministers and the Senate in St. Petersburg not to interfere in Finnish affairs. At the Porvoo (Borgå) meeting of the Finnish Diet in 1809 Alexander promised to respect Finland's existing laws and "constitutions" and announced the establishment of a Government Council consisting exclusively of inhabitants of the Grand Duchy. The major purpose of this Council, or the Finnish Senate after 1816, was to direct and coordinate the operation of Finland's internal administration. A Committee for Finnish Affairs (the State Secretariat for Finnish Affairs after 1826), staffed largely by citizens of Finland, was established in St. Petersburg as a coordinating office through which all matters pertaining to Finland had to go. Similar arrangements were made for Congress Poland after 1815, including a Polish minister secretary who resided in St. Petersburg and served as a representative of Polish interests and as an intermediary between the emperor and Russian officials in Warsaw and St. Petersburg. Furthermore, in one respect Polish autonomy seemed to be more satisfactorily guaranteed than that of the Finns: Alexander I granted the kingdom of Poland a Constitutional Charter that provided for regular meetings of a Polish Sejm, local self-government, a separate army, and civil rights for Polish subjects of the Russian Emperor, who ruled as king of Poland.

Elsewhere in the western borderlands privileged German and Polish elites gained new ground, especially in the areas of peasant reform and education. Peasant reform did not become a serious issue in Lithuania, Belorussia, and the right-bank Ukraine, where the landowning Polish szlachta shared many of the social attitudes of Great Russian landowners. But local leaders of Polish society endeavored to use education as a means of isolating these areas culturally and linguistically from the rest of the empire. The Polish Commission of National Education, founded in 1773, had already laid the foundations for a viable network of schools. During the first third of the nineteenth century these schools contributed significantly to the re-Polonization of the middle and upper classes in the very area where Catherine II had recommended Russification in the latter part of the eighteenth century.

In the Baltic Provinces, the emancipation of the Estonian and Latvian serfs between 1816 and 1819 provided an essential point of departure for a social and economic development quite different from that of the Great Russian center of the empire. During the ensuing half century a system of elementary education with Estonian and Latvian as the languages of instruction, a rudimentary form of peasant self-government, and an agricultural economy based on free labor and the principle of private property gradually evolved. By the 1860s the progressive accentuation of the differences separating the organization of the society and economy of the Baltic Provinces from that of the center of the empire had greatly complicated the task of administrators hoping to extend to the region the Russian Great Reforms.

The terms of serf emancipation in the Baltic Provinces were worked out early in the reign of Alexander I by committees representing the local nobility. These committees studied peasant obligations and landholding and compiled new and more reliable inventories of obligations (Wackenbücher). Committees representing the Livland Ritterschaft were particularly important. Initially, the Russian government exercised some influence over this work, but its attention was soon drawn away from Baltic peasant questions by war and other more pressing affairs, while the few Russian officials attached to the local Baltic committees had little first-hand knowledge about Baltic affairs and generally accepted the advice of the Germans with whom they worked. This advice, of course, usually favored the interests of the local landowners. The peasant was emancipated without land and remained economically and socially dependent on the Baltic German nobility. He was a free man and a member of a self-governing rural community that now elected its own officers; he was called upon to help organize and support rural elementary schools and to participate in the administration of local affairs. However, if he desired to leave his native province he had to obtain permission from the local landowner and from officers of his local peasant community, who carried out their duties and functions under the watchful eye and supervision of the nearby nobility and officials working for the organs of the Baltic Ritterschaften. And, to some extent freedom became a mixed blessing, for the landowner no longer had the legal and moral responsibility to take care of the peasants in times of need.

For all its shortcomings the emancipation of the Baltic peasant did provide Estonian and Latvian peasants with opportunities for elementary education that existed for few peasants in other parts of the empire during the first part of the nineteenth century. The Russian government of that time did little to promote the dissemination of literacy among peasants, and the social structure and values associated with serfdom discouraged the Russian clergy and nobility from taking the initiative in founding schools. In the Baltic Provinces, however, many peasants had been taught reading under the supervision of the Protestant clergy even before the emancipation. Beginning in 1819 legislation, approved separately in each of the three Baltic Provinces, opened the way for the establishment of an elementary educational system that spread literacy among Baltic peasants several generations earlier than elsewhere in the empire (with the exception of Finland). What was achieved by this educational system, it should be noted, depended on the commitment and supportiveness not only of the German clergy and nobility but also of the Estonian and Latvian peasantry. Local authorities controlled and supervised the rural school. The Russian Ministry of Education, as its official historian sadly commented, "was altogether eliminated from the business of elementary, popular education in the Baltic region."

In regard to secondary and higher education, the system of national education established in 1802 was a highly decentralized one. The actual administration of school affairs was centered in six educational regions located in Dorpat (Tartu), Vilna, Kharkov, Kazan, Moscow, and St. Petersburg. Liaison between them and the Ministry of Education was maintained through curators who resided initially in St. Petersburg. In the Dorpat and Vilna regions German and Polish were the respective languages of instruction, and textbooks and educational programs were determined by local German or Polish professors and administrators. The educational affairs of Finland and Congress Poland were then administered in almost complete isolation from those of the rest of the empire. Four of the eight universities in the Russian Empire between 1816 and 1830 were located in the western borderlands, their languages of instruction being Polish (Warsaw and Vilna), German (Dorpat), and Swedish (Åbo/Helsingfors).

A thorough reconsideration of educational and other aspects of borderland policy began under Nicholas I, especially after the Polish insurrection of November 1830. During the 1840s attention was drawn to the Baltic Provinces because of the failure of the local German landowners to prevent serious social unrest among the Estonian and Latvian peasantry. The efforts under Nicholas I to codify Russian law, to draft new municipal legislation, to deal with the problems of the empire's peasant population, and to centralize and standardize bureaucratic controls over society pointed in the direction of lessening the dependence of the Russian government on borderland nobles. Nicholas' minister of the interior during the forties, L. A. Perovskii (1792-1856), advocated for Poland, Finland, and the Baltic Provinces the introduction of Russian laws, administration, and municipal institutions as well as the establishment of Russian as the official language of the local administration and as the language of instruction in schools. Nicholas I, despite his interest in unifying and centralizing the empire's administrative and legal system, did not accept these proposals in their entirety.