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 main-
tained serfdom. Andrejs Plakans calls this Baltics policy“permissive autocracy.”
Two agencies from St. Petersburg ruled the Baltics, one judicial (the College of
Justice for Livland, Finland, and Estland Affairs) withfive members, most of whom
were Baltic Germans, a procurator and staff, and afinancial 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 offive 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 devel-
opment 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 Balticsflourished 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 (Göttingen, 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 con-
demning 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
118 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801