thinking about the“folk”and the collective spirit of ethnicity and culture. In Riga
Herder collected and later published Estonian and Latvian folk songs. Others
continued his collecting and publishing of Latvian and Estonian folklore, songs,
and tales, as well as of Latvian grammars and dictionaries and ethnographic
encyclopedias of Livland and Estland. Plakans suggests that over 220 works in
Estonian were published in the eighteenth century, and in Latvian about 700
between 1755 and 1835. As he points out, however, by the end of the century in
revolutionary times all this attention to educating the peasantry prompted suspi-
cion in official and noble quarters, and in some areas (particularly non-Protestant
pockets of the Baltics), education for peasants was scaled back.
Peter and his successors valued Baltic Germans in imperial service; over 3,000
were allowed to study in German universities in the eighteenth century, and a large
minority of the Russian empire’s senior public servants (one-eighth between 1710
and 1917) were Baltic Germans. Peter I modeled some of his administrative
reforms on the Baltic model and its Swedish forebears, particularly urban institu-
tions and the elected nobleLandratin provincial government. Catherine II drew on
the Baltic German judicial model for the 1775 administrative reforms, a major
thrust of which in the Russian center was to enhance noble participation in local
government.
The implementation of these reforms in the Baltics undermined regional auton-
omy. Despite, or perhaps because of Baltic Germans’responses to the Legislative
Commission in 1767, where they resisted any effort to be put under empire-wide
Figure 5.2Estonian peasant farms are preserved at the Estonian Open Air Museum outside
of Tallinn (historical Reval). Photo: Jack Kollmann.Western Borderlands in the Eighteenth Century 119