The Baltic Provinces: some comparisons

By the end of the eighteenth century a series of five tax censuses carried out by the government of the Russian Empire had created for later generations of social historians a vast body of primary sources in the form of household lists. These ‘revisions of souls’ (Russ. revizskie skazki), as they were called, contained the names of taxpayitig Russians, as well as those of a host of other peoples annexed by a succession of tsars and tsarinas in the course of the century. One non-Russian territory consisted of the three so-called ‘Baltic Provinces’ (Russ. Pribaltika): Livland and Estland, which had been acquired from Sweden in 1720, at the conclusion of the Great Northern War; and Kurland, which was incorporated into the Empire during the territorial adjustments accompanying the Third Partition of Poland in 1795 (see fig. 5.1). The landed nobilities (Ritterschaften) of these Baltic lands were German-speaking, as was nearly all of the minuscule town population. The enserfed peasantries, on the other hand, consisted of Estonian-speakers in Estland and the northern half of Livland, and of Latvian-speakers in southern Livland and in Kurland. Both landowner and peasant in this area had seen changes of sovereigns several times before the eighteenth century, together with the waxing and waning of threats to landowners' powers. The Swedish Vasas in particular had tried to alter traditional lordserf relations, but with little permanent effect.