REFORM AND RUSSIFICATION IN THE WESTERN BORDERLANDS, 1796-1855

Essentially, the Russian government's relations with the empire's borderlands is to be seen as an aspect of local government. Russia was an undergoverned country, and even in the Great Russian center of the empire the lack of appropriate institutions, the absence of satisfactory legal and administrative order, and the insufficient number of competent and trained officials made it difficult for the government to rule effectively outside St. Petersburg and the guberniia capitals. However, Russia, like other European states, often tried to impose her own religious and political norms on national and religious minorities living within her frontiers. This was particularly the case in the eastern borderlands and the left-bank Ukraine, where the local elites were either easily assimilated or had weakly developed institutions of self-government. In the western borderlands, on the other hand, the local administrative, legal, and social institutions often seemed to be superior to those of the Great Russian center. These institutions were the product of a long historical development that had permitted Polish szlachta, German burghers and nobles, and Swedish estates either to win new rights and privileges or to defend old ones in a secular struggle with relatively weak Polish or Swedish kings. Russia, a much more powerful monarchy than either Poland or Sweden, initially confirmed these rights and privileges because it was expedient for her to try to assure for herself the cooperation of the Polish, German, and Swedish upper classes in newly conquered areas during wars with Sweden and France in the eighteenth and at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Although no Russian ruler seems to have considered these promises to have been of the binding contractual nature assumed by certain Baltic German and Finnish publicists, a sufficient number of well-educated and competent borderland nobles performed useful services for the Russian state to incline Russian rulers up to Alexander III to confirm the autonomy and special rights of the upper classes in the western borderlands as long as they remained loyal to Russia. Furthermore, because Russian law was neither uniform nor codified before the 1830s and because there was a shortage of trained jurists and officials, defenders of local privileges easily found arguments against the wisdom of introducing Russian laws and institutions. Only after Russian society had been profoundly altered by the reforms of the sixties and seventies did it seem appropriate to proceed systematically with programs of Russification in the western borderlands.

Neither Russification nor the reforms of the 1860s and 1870s can be properly understood without some reference to earlier efforts to centralize and rationalize government and to apply in Russia what George Yaney has referred to as "legal-administrative system." These efforts affected the eastern borderlands of the empire and the left-bank Ukraine as early as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Baltic Provinces, Old Finland, and the lands acquired from Poland between 1772 and 1795 were brought directly under the supervision of the central government during the eighteenth century. Interference in the local affairs of the Baltic Provinces began in the mid-eighteenth century, when agents of the central government suggested the introduction of measures based on seventeenth-century Swedish legislation in order to increase government revenues and to protect Estonian and Latvian peasants from arbitrary treatment at the hands of their German masters. Catherine II, as is well known, viewed borderland privileges with particular suspicion and favored from the very beginning of her reign a basic "Russification" of their administration and political institutions. During the latter part of her reign Russian forms of taxation (especially the head tax) and the Russian guberniia, nobility, and town institutions provided for in the Provincial Reform of 1775 and the Charters to the Nobility and Towns of 1785 were introduced throughout the vast area that had been annexed from Poland and Sweden during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

In November and December of 1796 five decrees of Paul I set Livland, Estland, Old Finland, and the former Polish lands apart from the rest of the empire, declaring them to be gubernii administered on "special foundations according to their rights and privileges." But Paul believed, no less than did his mother Catherine, in the need to keep the provinces under the control and supervision of the central government and its agents. It was chiefly in the areas of strictly local affairs, courts, and the administration of law that he willingly permitted the western borderlands to deviate from the norms observed elsewhere in the empire. He continued to collect the head tax throughout this region, whereas in the Baltic Provinces he introduced the Russian recruitment system — something from which Estonian and Latvian peasants had been spared before 1796. In addition, despite Paul's restoration of privileges, governors-general, civil and military governors, boards of public welfare, and guberniia financial and treasury offices continued to represent the authority of the...