Multi-ethnicity and Estonian Tsarist State Officials in Estland Province, 1881–1914

Abstract

For several decades historians of the Baltic region of the Russian empire have given increased attention to the complex relationships between its inhabitants and the state in the late tsarist period. The actions of the state, particularly the reforms undertaken in the last quarter of the 19th century, are seen to have been contradictory, in both intent and outcome.1 The reforms weakened the locally dominant Baltic German urban and rural elites and strengthened—in many areas creating for the first time—Russian state institutions. While the reforms did not result in a complete eclipse of Baltic German participation in public life, the widespread changes in public life and government in the Baltic region they brought about coincided with the formation of an Estonian educated class. Estonians began to participate, to degrees not previously seen, in the institutions of public life, from the level of the rural township to the structures of the Russian provincial administration.