ABSTRACT
Social and economic conditions in the Baltic provinces differed from those in the Russian heartland in a number of respects. The most fundamental one was that landowners and peasants belonged to different nationalities. In the Baltikum (that is, Estland, Livland and Kurland), the landowning class consisted mainly of the German aristocracy, descendants of the Teutonic knights, who still in the twentieth century referred to themselves as a Ritterschaft (‘corporation of nobles’). In Estland and northern Livland, the peasants were Estonian; in southern Livland and Kurland, they were Latvian. In the Lithuanian provinces of Vilna and Kovno, the landowners were either Polish or Russian and the peasants were Lithuanian.
