ROGER BARTLETT

THE RUSSIAN NOBILITY AND THE BALTIC GERMAN NOBILITY IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

Peter the Great's conquest of Livonia in the Great Northern War brought within the boundaries of the future Russian Empire a nobility, the Baltic German Ritterschaften or knightly corporations, whose origins, traditions, structure and world view were quite different from those of the Muscovite service classes. The Baltic German nobility became one of those non-Russian noble groupings within the Imperial Russian state which presented to the Crown and government a problem of control and integration, and to those Russians involved in the developing post- Petrine debate over noble status possible models and assumptions alternative to those of the Imperial regime.

Conciliation and integration of alien subject elites was a long-established strategy in the expansionist policies of Muscovite and Imperial governments,1 whether dealing (for example) with the Tatars of the Volga2 or the Cossack starshina of the Ukraine.3 The Baltic German nobility found its way rapidly and easily into the service structure of Imperial Russia; but it was also very successful in maintaining its own identity and independence, right up to 1920, and, too, in its influence as a model for eighteenth-century Russian rulers concerned to reshape the organization, functions and status of their service elite.

In taking over Sweden's Baltic provinces, Peter inherited a strongly-developed, self-conscious and well-organized political system of local administrative and judicial autonomy, and privileged landholding. The established rights of the Ritterschaften had been severely infringed by the administrative changes of Charles XI of Sweden in the 1690's, and by his attempted "reduction" or resumption of numerous Crown estates made over to nobles. However, both Charles' measures, and a 1719 patent of Ulrike Leonore which would have overturned them, were overtaken by the events of the Great Northern War. The akkordnye punkty or points of capitulation which the Ritterschaften agreed with the Russian commander-in- chief Sheremet'ev in 1710 guaranteed the full pre-Caroline plenitude of privileges

Cahiers du Monde russe et soviétique, XXX IV (1-2), janvier-juin 1993, pp. 233-244.