- Project Runeberg -  The main issues confronting the minorities of Latvia and Eesti /
10

(1922) Author: Alfons Heyking - Tema: Estonia, Latvia
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landowners. This mode of procedure secured to the provinces a high degree
of efficiency in the culture of the land and an all-round prosperity. The
liberation of the peasantry in the Baltic Provinces has, therefore, borne
much better results than in the rest of Russia, as has already been
stated; in neither case was the land given to the peasants as a free gift,
they had to pay for it, the difference consisting only in the manner of
payment. In the Baltic Provinces only those paid for it who acquired
it as a personal free property, while in the rest of Russia, the whole
peasantry had to pay for it.

It was a further advantage of the Baltic Provinces that the
landowners administered the estates themselves, living on the land, whereas
in Russia proper, many of the nobility abandoned their landed property
to the use of the peasants, receiving in exchange an annual royalty, the
Obrok.

But what about agrarian murders and the spirit of revolt which
made itself felt in the Baltic lands long before the Revolution? The
local social constitution was certainly out-of-date, but all efforts made
by the nobility and bourgeoisie towards local reforms, in a liberal sense,
were systematically thwarted by the central government. During the
last fifty years the Diets of the three provinces submitted to the
Imperial government a series of projects of progressive reform in order to
bring the Letts and Ests into line in equality of rights with the Balts,
themselves. But, all these projects found an early grave in the archives
of the Government, since it was deemed expedient by the Russian
Bureaucracy to keep open the grievances of the Letts and Ests as a
constant irritant against the Balts. Not content with this insidious
policy of playing one part of the population against the other, the
Russian Government endeavoured to instigate the Lettish and Estonian
peasants against their land-lords, by infecting the schools with extreme
socialistic propaganda, and by disorganising the whole economic and
social fabric of the country. The bureaucracy sowed the storm and
reaped the whirlwind! It was in 1905 that the Russian socialistic
revolution overthrew also in the Baltic provinces the Russian governing
power for the time being, and in 1917, that a Lettish Bolshevik regiment
took a prominent part in establishing the Bolshevik regime in Petrograd.

The present crisis which has been precipitated on the Balts, has a
two-fold root, one of which is related to the European cultural
evolution, and the other to circumstances peculiar to Baltic life.

European culture is at present, in a transition stage, which is chiefly
brought about by the ascendency of the manual labourer, the peasant
and the proletarian. This process has been gathering strength from
strike to strike, and revolution to revolution of the lower strata of the
population which, favoured by the modern principle of personal
freedom, aims more and more at levelling down the community to one
position in life.

As long as the Constitution dividing the population into separate
classes, existed, and the bidding for equality was limited, cultural
evolution was not very apparent in public life, but when the barriers
separating the classes had been done away with, in favour of a new social
equality — which found its apotheosis in universal suffrage — before

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