led by a governor from a leading family and a board ofmirzyand overseen by the
Russian-appointed military governor forfiscal and security issues. Within a year, in
1784, this structure was dissolved with the introduction of the 1775 Russian
administrative reforms. This system, which relied on local nobles being elected to
staff the dozens of new civil and judicial offices, resulted in a generous participation
of elite Tatars in office. While, as Kelly O’Neill showed, Tatarmirzyheld only
about 15 percent of very high, appointed offices, they gained over 80 percent of
district level offices, thereby maintaining their dominance in governing this multi-
ethnic community. By 1802 Russia had limited Tatars to district level to open up
more opportunity for Russian, Greek, Armenian, and other elites. Russia also co-
opted Crimean Tatars by enlisting them in a voluntary Light Horse Regiment with
land and salaries, attached to the Russian army as irregulars like a Cossack Host.
Russia deployed them in the Polish and Napoleonic wars but cautiously did not
send this regiment against the Ottomans.
Governor-General Potemkin tried to balance Tatar authority with the
in-migration of hundreds of state peasants and Orthodox clergymen from Russian-
and Ukrainian-speaking areas into Crimea; foreigners also arrived—Moldavians
and Wallachians, Swedes, Poles and Germans, Greeks, Bulgarians and Corsicans, a
Mennonite community. All enjoyed differential rights and privileges. Russia even
advertised in Europe for traders and craftsmen to replace the urban populace that
had left and to restore local viticulture, sericulture, animal husbandry, and other
enterprises. Most settled on the steppe north of the peninsula, leaving Tatars in
control on the peninsula. In absolute numbers the Tatar population had been cut
in half, but by 1795 it still constituted about 75 percent of the population, with
Russians about 4 percent and many other ethnic groups (Greeks, Armenians,
Ukrainians, and Jews) constituting around 2 percent each. Tatars were forced to
engage in the empire’s multi-ethnic governance institutions, but they were still
dominant in their homeland.
THE BALTICS
When Russia won Livonia (Estland and Livland) from Sweden (de facto in 1710,
affirmed by the Treaty of Nystadt in 1721), it acquired lands with robust European
social and political structures originating in the thirteenth-century capture of these
Latvian and Estonian lands by German-speaking Catholic Knights. When the
Teutonic (based in Prussia) and Livonian Knights secularized in the sixteenth
century, they set off decades of warfare between Sweden, the Commonwealth of
Poland-Lithuania, and Russia over this valuable Baltic littoral. The Livonian War
(1558–83) was disastrous for Russia (embroiled in Ivan IV’s Oprichnina 1564–72),
but a great success for Sweden, which won Estland (the bulk of modern-day
Estonia) with capital at Reval/Tallinn (Figure 5.1) and major port at Narva. The
Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth kept control of the Latvian-speaking lands of
Livland and Courland until 1629, when Sweden captured them, with the capital at
Riga and major city at Dorpat (Tartu, Iur’ev).
116 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801