Up to the mid-nineteenth century, the Jews suffered from their anomalous position within the empire, from popular prejudice and from the government’s inability to match aspirations with practical measures. There was as yet, however, no concerted ethnic or racial doctrine directed against them: that was to be a product of a more nationally conscious era, when publicists wanted to explain away the continuing rift between Russian people and Russian empire.
THE BALTIC At the opposite extremity from the Poles and the Jews were the German landed nobles of the Baltic provinces which Peter I conquered from the Swedes in the early eighteenth century. They entered the Tsar’s service with conviction and remained perhaps of all ethnic groups the most loyal to him right up to the end of the empire, even in the period when national identity became the cardinal question in European politics.
There were good reasons for this. Of all the empire’s elites, the Baltic German barons were alone in having nobody with whom they might potentially form a nation. On the lands they owned the peasants were Estonian and Latvian-speaking, fairly labile as regards ethnic identity, but certainly not identifying with Germany.51 Furthermore, from the time of their incorporation, the Baltic barons possessed privileges which no other social or ethnic group managed to gain under the autocracy. Peter I confirmed the Ritterschaften of Estland and Livland in all the corporate rights and privileges which they had enjoyed under the Swedish crown, but had been in danger of losing: these included the right to run local government in the countryside, preservation of the Lutheran church, of German law and the German court system, and use of the German language for all official business. They were not absorbed into the Russian nobility, but kept their distinct identity and institutions.52 Succeeding monarchs confirmed these arrangements: indeed, they later provided some of the principles on which Catherine II reformed the imperial nobility in 1785. (It is true that in carrying out this reform, Catherine also abolished the Baltic nobles’ self-governing institutions, but they were restored by Paul a couple of decades later, and not interfered with again till the later nineteenth century.)
Peter took this unusual line with the Baltic barons because he recognized in them the ideal servitors he needed to carry through the kind of reforms he had in mind. They had long experience of corporate self-government on western models. They had easy access to German universities, where public administration in the spirit of cameralism was taught better than anywhere else in the world. Their Lutheran faith, with its emphasis on personal probity and loyalty to the state, was also an asset. In effect, Peter offered them a deal: confirmation of their privileges in return for loyal service to the Russian Empire.
This was a deal which had much to commend it from their viewpoint as well, and not merely in order to preserve their privileges. Young Germans imbued with ideals of good government picked up at Jena or Göttingen found that the petty principalities of their motherland could offer scant scope for their talents. Even relatively large and enlightened Prussia yielded to Russia in the opportunities it afforded for the deployment of their skills. Russia was a huge and backward empire, whose ruler was determined to develop its resources and mobilize its people: there, if anywhere, was the chance of achievement and promotion. The Tsars entrusted them with high positions of command, both in the armed forces and the civil service. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, of the 2,867 senior officials mentioned by Erik Amburger in his detailed study of the imperial bureaucracy, 498 (17.4%) were of German origin, and 355 of those from the Baltic provinces alone. In the second quarter of the nineteenth century, when this German influence reached its height, the figures were even higher.53
Like the English aristocracy of the nineteenth century, the Baltic German nobles combined ancient institutions with a modern understanding of statecraft and usually a ruthless exploitation of the rural population working on their estates. Uniquely among the nobilities of the Russian Empire, they practised entail rather than dividing their estates on the death of the owner. They combined a close interest in agriculture on their domains with an urban and cosmopolitan lifestyle: Riga and Reval, both centres of international trade, ensured contact with Germany and with a wider world and gave them regular intercourse with professional and commercial people, who were often German too, or at least spoke the language.
FINLAND Finland was an unusual success story for Russian imperial policy in the nineteenth century, at least until the final decade. That relative success was due partly to the singular circumstances in which Finland was received into the Empire. A province of Sweden at the beginning of the nineteenth century, it was conquered by the Russians during the war against Sweden in 1808–9.
The defeat of the Swedish army did not automatically entail the willing acquiescence of the Finnish people: guerrilla armies were formed and became troublesome to the new Russian administration. In an attempt to win over the Finns, Alexander I promised to uphold all the liberties they had enjoyed under the Swedish crown, and he summoned a meeting of the Finnish Diet at Poorvoo in March 1809. Under the arrangements worked out then, Finland kept its own laws and institutions, and had its own ruling council, or Senate, quite separate from the Russian government, and reporting personally to the Tsar in his capacity as Grand Duke of Finland. The Grand Duchy was even permitted to have its own small army. This kind of concession went further than the normal Russian imperial practice of respecting local traditions and conciliating local elites: it left Finland with unmistakable home rule.
Alexander’s policy was almost completely successful in gaining the Finns’ allegiance, and in this way a unique situation arose: the Russian Empire became home to a small European state, with its traditional laws and liberties inherited from the past. It is true that the Tsars did not see fit to convene the Diet for more than half a century, but in other respects they honoured the engagements they had entered into. The Finns reciprocated: in 1830 they remained quiescent, and some of their army units actually took part in the repression of the Polish rebellion. Finns did quite well out of the settlement with Russia: their high-flyers could take service in the Russian army and civil service, while the reverse road was closed to Russians.
More than that, the Finnish national movement, once it began to take hold during the mid-nineteenth century, initially received the support of the Russian government, as a counter-weight to the cultural and linguistic influence of the Swedes, which had hitherto been dominant. As late as the 1880s, one might have pointed to Finland as an example of successful Russian imperial integration.54
CENTRAL ASIA Turkestan and the oases of Central Asia were not brought into the Russian Empire till the second half of the nineteenth century. They were conquered partly for traditional reasons of security: to protect the open southern border of steppe and desert. As Foreign Minister Gorchakov argued in a classic defence of Russian imperialism sent to other European powers in 1864: ‘The situation of Russia in Central Asia is similar to that of all civilised states which come into contact with half-savage nomadic tribes without a firm social organisation. In such cases, the interests of border security and trade relations always require that the more civilised state have a certain authority over its neighbours, whose wild and unruly customs render them very troublesome. It begins first by curbing raids and pillaging. To put an end to these, it is often compelled to reduce the neighbouring tribes to some degree of close subordination.’55
There were also economic motives in play: the need for a secure