ABSTRACT
The report was alarming. The revolutionaries had burned down “almost all manors,” dissolved government institutions, and took portraits of the tsar off the walls in the offices of Hasenpoth (Latvian: Aizpute) district in the province of Kurland. In the north of the district, usurpers proclaimed a “Latvian Republic” and took weapons from a Finnish (!) ship. The anonymous author concluded more than two years later that nobody could be certain in these days, that “our borderland” was still in Russian hands. Even in peacetime, he asserted, there were only “inorodtsy i inovertsy” (different by their origin and/or faith) in state offices. Moreover, the Baltic barons were organizing the resettlement of German colonists to Kurland. It seemed as if the whole non-Russian borderland along the Baltic Sea was uniting to eliminate Russian authority in the region, which was so close to the capital geographically. The author ended his small piece, published in the chauvinist paper Okrainy Rossii (Russia's borderlands) in early 1908, with the desperate assurance that every Russian who was not yet “Germanized, Latvianized, or Lutheranized” feels that they are “on enemy territory.” The empire in the Baltic littoral apparently was in great danger. 1 In the historiography on the Baltic Provinces of the Russian Empire, which has traditionally been dominated by local scholars, 2 many studies have focused on the excesses of the local revolution in 1905. The littoral was indeed shaken by a wave of violence, especially in the countryside of the Livland and Estland provinces, where it was directed mostly against German landowners and clergy. 3 During these months of extreme violence, the tiny group of Germans, whose elite had played a dominant role in the provinces for centuries, finally sensed how dependent they were on imperial support. Only massive counter-violence exercised by the imperial army and German self-defense units allowed the old authorities to regain control. In the aftermath of the upheaval and using new freedoms granted by tsar Nicholas II, German associations in the provinces were established to address the needs of the community, offering some comfort and an ethnic consciousness which was hitherto quite foreign to the Germans of the littoral. 4 A far more important consequence of the nationalization process taking place in reaction to ethnic violence, was that any kind of political cooperation between Baltic Germans on the one hand, and Estonian and Latvian representatives on the other, eventually became extremely difficult to negotiate. 5 It seems that, in the very sensitive Baltic borderland, the clash of ethnicities loomed large. How did the imperial government react?
