Full resolution (JPEG) - On this page / på denna sida - Chapter I. An Historic Survey of the Cultural Conditions of the Baltic Lands
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that the racial difference between the rulers and the ruled made this
position more oppressive to the latter, but this cannot be regarded as
a slur upon the former. Moreover, it cannot be denied that those
responsible for and conducting the affairs of the country, were always
alive to the needs of the peasant population.“ It should also be borne
in mind that in judging the past of the Baltic lands, it is not fair to
apply modern moral standards to bygone centuries. It is really difficult
to see how things could have developed otherwise judging by the
standards of that time. European civilisation and culture and the
Christian religion were in the Middle Ages implanted all over the world
by more or less forcible methods. To speak of special wrongs having
been perpetrated upon the native inhabitants of the Balticum, is simply
measuring a time of legalised violence by modern standards of legalised
freedom, evidently, a fundamental logical error.
Until some fifty years ago, the Baltic burghers and nobility lived
in close and amicable relationship with the Lettish and Estonian people
of the town and country districts. The former patriarchal state of affairs
had, of course, to give way to more democratic political and social
constructions and the ruling gentry endeavoured to bring this about. While
serfdom was abolished in Russia proper as late as 1861, Estonia, Livonia,
and Courland liberated their peasants in 1816, 1817 and 1819 — viz.,
nearly half a century earlier. The manner in which the peasantry was
liberated in the Baltic Provinces differs greatly from the methods
adopted in Russia proper. Guided by the Utopian idea of providing all the
peasants with land, the Russian government foisted upon them the
communistic idea of the common ownership of land. A certain part of the
property was expropriated from the landowners, and a price for it was
paid from the States Exchequer. The land thus acquired was handed
over to the villages under the stipulation that each village en bloc
should repay the State by yearly instalments until the sum total
originally paid to the landowners should be redeemed.
In the Baltic Provinces, Estonia, Livonia and Courland, as
no financial facilities could be expected at that time from a
government which had not yet recognised such a measure, the
liberation of the peasants had to be brought about in a less ambitious
way, though more practical and beneficial. Each estate was divided up
into lots; there were those that were given over to the peasants and
those that were retained by the original land-owners. The peasants’
land was at first leased to individual farmers among the peasants
themselves, and afterwards sold to them as freehold by the help of local
Societies of Credit founded by the gentry for this special purpose.
Altogether the transition was carried out much more gradually; the
landowners did not receive the price for the sale of their land in a lump
sum, and individual property was introduced among the peasants — a
form of ownership which, even from an agricultural point of view, proved
superior to that of the common ownership in Russia. Of course it
was not every peasant who could become a freeholder, but only those
who through their own capability and industry were able to buy land
and maintain themselves upon it. Others entered the various trades,
becoming workmen, hiring themselves out to peasant or gentry
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