guaranteed the religious freedom of Lutherans as he recruited officers, engineers,
and tradesmen and when he conquered previously Swedish Karelian areas full of
Finnish-speaking Lutherans. When Russia acquired Livland and Estland, the
Treaty of Nystad (1721) guaranteed freedom of confession to all non-Orthodox.
Lutheranism in the Baltics provides a good example of imperial confessionalizing
policy in this century. The state preferred to work with established religions which
they presumed represented entire ethnic or cultural communities; state policy
addressed the collective, not individuals, denying individuals the right to change
religions out of their native-born creed. The state was particularly uncomfortable
with splinter groups. When, for example, the Herrnhuter Pietist movement gained
ground among Lutherans, the state expelled it from Livonia in 1743 as a disruptive
force fomenting discontent among the peasantry. In the meantime Empress Anna
Ioannovna had issued a Manifesto (1735) affirming religious freedom to the
established Christian faiths (Lutheran, Reform, and Catholic) in the Baltics, later
affirmed by Peter III and Catherine II.
Lutherans thrived in the Russian empire. By the eighteenth century there were
eight Lutheran bishoprics, the most populous in Estland and Livland (and Cour-
land, acquired in 1795). Lutherans there included German-speaking nobles and
townsmen and Latvian- and Finnish-speaking peasants. From 1710 traditional
political institutions and social privileges of the Baltic lands had been guaranteed,
including a noble-dominated system of local government and representative
assemblies (as well as serfdom for Estonian and Latvian peasants), urban self-
government, and rights for the Evangelical-Lutheran Church, which maintained
bishoprics, parishes, and schools of basic literacy and religious instruction. The
Baltic territories, including the Lutheran Church, were supervised with a very light
hand from St. Petersburg by the College of Justice for Livland and Estland Affairs
(established 1728–9); this College oversaw German-law courts and civil adminis-
tration,finances, taxation, and peasant–landlord issues; in essence it ratified the
dominance of the German nobility in public life and social control. The primacy of
the Lutheran Church in the Baltics was not infringed by Catherinian reforms or
their retrenchment by Paul I.
Lutheranism alsoflourished elsewhere in the empire. Large communities and
parishes could be found in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kazan, Astrakhan, and many
other trading centers. Many Finnish-speaking Lutherans lived in Karelia; thousands
populated the 117 German colonies in Samara and Saratov gubernii on the Volga.
About three-quarters of the German Volga colonists were Lutheran (others were
Catholic and Reform, i.e., Calvinist); they preserved German language, clothing,
and customs of daily life, avoiding contact with Russians and assimilation into the
dominant society. They imported Lutheran pastors primarily from the Baltics (the
University of Dorpat/Tartu was a hub of training and publication of German
liturgical and devotional works), as well as from Switzerland, Saxony, Prussia, and
Holland. Communities observed regular Sunday services, maintained parish
schools for catechism and lay literacy, and built community life around the parish.
Through the eighteenth century no single state institution oversaw these various
Lutheran communities; when Nicholas I reorganized state oversight of the empire’s
Confessionalization in a Multi-ethnic Empire 403