Recovering the voice of the oppressed: Master, slave, and serf in the Baltic provinces

Abstract

Historians writing about the Baltic provinces allude to the harsh life of the peasants, but since the peasants did not leave their own historical records, their voice has been absent from scholars' accounts of the 700-years period of German domination. The elusive voice of the peasants may be found in the Latvian folk songs or dainas. The dainas inform us of the modes of oppression the peasants suffered and the modes of resistance they employed. They thereby contradict the widely held beliefs that the peasants had accepted their status and that the dainas do not depict concrete reality. This peasant poetry provides a window into their experience of slavery and thereby enables us to ground the history of the colonial period in that experience.