Iurii Fedorovich Samarin and Baltic history

Abstract

The significance of Iurii Samarin (1819-1876) as a Baltic historian has often been overlooked. Thoroughly trained in history, literature, and philosophy at Moscow University, Samarin was the first historian to use both Baltic German and Russian archival sources to study, systematically and critically, the social, economic, religious, and political interaction of Estonians, Germans, Latvians, Poles, and Russians in the Baltikum since the thirteenth century. Samarin's studies of Baltic emancipation, the conversion movement of the 1840s, and the history of Riga are works of exemplary historical scholarship that are still of value to students of Baltic history. Samarin attended Moscow University and completed a master's dissertation there during the years 1834-1844, a decade of Russian intellectual development dominated by currents of romantic nationalism and German philosophical idealism. While working on his dissertation, which focused on the impact of Protestantism and Roman Catholicism on the Russian Orthodox Church during the reign of Peter the Great, Samarin came under the influence of the Slavophile ideas of K. S. Aksakov, A. S. Khomiakov, and I. V. Kireevskii. Samarin, who had read widely in the works of European thinkers of the first part of the nineteenth century, soon made his own independent contribution to the Slavophile view of history and society. He first applied Slavophile ideas to the study of history in his dissertation on Stefan Iavorskii i Feofan Prokopovich, which he completed in 1843. During that same year he read Lorenz von Stein's Uber den Sozialismus und Communismus des heutigen Frankreichs (Leipzig, 1842), which called his attention to the proletariat and socialism as problems of Western European society. In an essay he then wrote about Stein's book, Samarin cautiously suggested that not socialism but the application of Christian principles to the problems of society offered the most promising approach