The Russian Empire 1450–1801

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law, deeming their local laws and privileges sufficient and superior, Catherine II
strove to integrate Livland and Estland’sfiscal 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 andfiscal
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 seamlesslyflowed 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 morefirmly 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.
In the partitions of Poland, more Latvian and Baltic German areas—Inflanty/
Latgale and the Duchy of Courland—came into the Russian empire. Inflanty,
with major city Dünaburg (Daugavpils/Dvinsk), came into Russian control in
1772 in thefirst partition and was added to the gubernia of Vitebsk. A rural
southeast corner of Livonia, Inflanty had been administratively a part of the
Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania since the sixteenth century; here a diverse
Catholic (Polish, Lithuanian, Ukrainian) and Lutheran German nobility ruled
over enserfed peasantry of Latvians (speaking Latgalian), Poles, and Lithuanians.
This ruling class enjoyed Polish noble rights, parliamentary institutions, and
Polish culture, which Russia maintained. The population was equally diverse—
in 1784 estimated to be 62 percent Catholic, 31 percent Uniate, 4 percent
Lutheran, 2 percent Jewish, and less than 1 percent each of Reform Protestants
and Old Believers.


120 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801

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