Finland and the Baltic provinces: Elite roles and social and economic conditions and structures

Abstract

In 1815 a million people lived in Finland and some 1.2 milion in the three Baltic Provinces of Estland, Livland, and Kurland. Like the Polish and Lithuanian provinces to the south, Finland and the Baltic Provinces had corporate institutions of self-government and enjoyed a degree of autonomy within the Russian Empire. Their Lutheran religion, the Germanic languages and cultures of their nobles, clergy, and townsmen, and the Estonian, Finnish, and Latvian nationality of their peasants separated them from their Polish, Lithuanian, and Russian neighbors. Finland differed from the Baltic Provinces in important respects. Finnish society was much less rigidly organized than Baltic. Having been closely associated with Sweden since the twelfth century, the Finns shared with the Swedes common laws and political and social institutions. Serfdom never took hold in Finland and the representation of the Peasant Estate in the Riksdag included Finnish-speaking freeholders together with representatives of the nobility, clergy, and townsmen from both Sweden and Finland. In the Baltic Provinces, on the other hand, the peasants, who were emancipated between 1816 and 1819, only received the right to own land in the second part of the nineteenth century; political participation in the Baltic Diets was limited, apart from two representatives with one vote from Riga, to noblemen who owned Ritterguter. The elites of Finland and the Baltic Provinces lived in a borderland area directly exposed to the influence of Western Europe and Sweden but, as part of a socially and politically backward Russian Empire, limited in its possibilities for provincial, regional, or national development. In this essay we will refer to three types of elitestraditional, national, and socialist. Each of them purported to be committed, in one way or another, to furthering the common good of the inhabitants of Finland and/or the Baltic Provinces. Without necessarily accepting the respective self-justifications