The early modern age
News •
During its first two centuries Lithuania’s political union with Poland consisted of a loose alliance based on a joint ruler. On July 1, 1569, the purely personal union was refashioned by a joint parliament meeting in Lublin into a Commonwealth of Two Peoples. While the state entity thereafter had a common elected sovereign and a joint parliament, the legal and administrative structures of the two lands, as well as their armed forces, remained separate. This situation lasted more than two centuries.
The Polish-Lithuanian union (sometimes called the Union of Lublin) initiated a period of political glory, prosperity, and cultural development. Until the middle of the 17th century, the Commonwealth contained the threat from Moscow. Indeed, during the Time of Troubles in Muscovy at the beginning of the 17th century, a Polish-Lithuanian force occupied Moscow. The Catholic Counter-Reformation that accompanied the union placed an indelible stamp on Lithuania. Vilnius emerged as a centre of Baroque culture. Its university, founded in 1579, is the oldest institution of higher learning in that part of the world.
The internal strength of the Confederation of Livonia diminished during the 16th century, though trade with Russia by the Hanseatic League (an organization of German merchants) brought prosperity to the towns. The Reformation rendered the ecclesiastical states anachronisms. The Confederation was unable to withstand the onslaughts of the Russian tsar Ivan IV (Ivan the Terrible), who in 1558 had laid claim to the region in an effort to gain an outlet to the sea. The region broke up into three duchies—Courland, Livonia, and Estland—an administrative division that lasted until 1917. Estland, the northern part of modern Estonia, came under Swedish rule. Livonia, with its capital, Riga, became a part of Lithuania, while Courland became a hereditary duchy nominally under Lithuanian suzerainty. German law and administration were retained. The nobility and the magistrates of the free cities kept their privileges.
In 1592 the Baltic lands became an object of contention between the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Sweden. The bulk of Livonia, with Riga, was ceded to Sweden in 1629. The southeastern portion, Latgale, remained a part of Lithuania.
The Swedish period remains one of happy memory among the Estonians and Latvians. The Swedish kings, accustomed to a free peasantry in their home country, sought in their struggles with the local nobility to improve the lot of the peasant serfs. Compulsory elementary education was introduced, and the Bible was translated into the indigenous languages. A secondary school was opened in Riga in 1631 and a university in Dorpat in 1632. Swedish administrative efforts, however, were largely thwarted by external turbulence and intermittent warfare in the region.
Courland, nominally under Lithuanian suzerainty, developed as a virtually independent state. Duke Jacob (1642–82) actively fostered trade and industry and created a navy. He acquired two colonies: Tobago in the West Indies and a settlement in Gambia on the west coast of Africa.
Russian hegemony
From the second half of the 17th century, the Baltic region faced increasing Russian pressure. During the first decade of the 18th century, Estland and Livonia came under Russian rule. By the end of the century, the remainder of Latvia and Lithuania had likewise been incorporated into the Russian Empire. In the middle of the 17th century, peasant unrest among the Cossacks in Ukraine and endemic war with Sweden over Livonia strained the resources of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Vilnius was taken for the first time by a Russian army in 1655. The Truce of Andrusovo in 1667 reestablished a temporary balance with Moscow, with some territory lost in the east. Even though the Commonwealth lost no territory as a result of the Great Northern War (1700–21), this conflict signaled the definite decline of the Polish-Lithuanian state.
The Great Northern War was a watershed in the historical development of Estonia and Latvia. As a result, the Swedish dominion over Livonia and Estland passed to Russia, though a special status of wide autonomy was maintained. In 1795 Courland, a fief of Lithuania, likewise came under Russian rule with a similar status. Incorporation into the Russian Empire provided great opportunities for the German nobility to increase its privilege and power over the peasants as well as to serve in the administration of the Russian Empire as a whole. The servile status of the peasantry increased.
During the greater part of the 18th century, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth remained an insignificant pawn ruled by a succession of Saxons who tended to embroil it in their dynastic struggles in Germany. An attempt at rejuvenation under Stanisław II August (Stanisław Poniatowski), who ruled from 1764 to 1795, led to direct foreign intervention. As a result of three partitions (1772, 1793, and 1795), the Commonwealth was erased from the political map of Europe. The first two partitions affected only the East Slav lands of Lithuania, which were ceded to Russia. As a result of the third and last partition, the bulk of the ethnographically Lithuanian lands passed to Russia as well. Only the southwestern part, between the Neman River and East Prussia, was annexed by Prussia. In 1815 that area also came under Russian control.
Throughout the 19th century tsarist rule differed considerably between the Baltic provinces of Estland, Livland, and Courland on the one hand and the Lithuanian lands and Latgale on the other. The former maintained a wide degree of autonomy, especially during the period of liberal reforms during the 1860s and ’70s. After 1881 there was a policy of Russification that lasted until 1905. It extended to education as well as to the legal and administrative systems. However, it could not affect the considerable progress that had been made in education over the century. By the middle of the 19th century, the German University of Dorpat (Tartu), reopened in 1802, had become a focal point in the development of Estonian and Latvian national consciousness. By the end of the century, there was virtually no illiteracy among the Estonians and Latvians.
The Lithuanian lands participated in the abortive Polish risings of 1830–31 and 1863–64 and suffered considerable repression in their aftermath. In 1832 the University of Vilnius was closed, and in 1840 the distinctive law code, in force since the 16th century, was abrogated. After the 1863 revolt Russification was extended to public life. Books in Lithuanian or Latgalian could be published only in the Cyrillic (i.e., the Russian) alphabet. Use of the Russian language became mandatory in all areas of public life, including education. Lithuanian resistance capitalized on the not insignificant Lithuanian population across the border in East Prussia. Books and periodicals printed there were smuggled across the border into Lithuania. Private “schools of the hearth” were organized in villages to provide a substitute for the Russian educational system.
Gradual modernization
The process of social and national emancipation began in the 19th century. The first step came with the abolition of serfdom. The earliest emancipation occurred in southwestern Lithuania, which had come under Prussian control in 1795. In 1807 it became part of the Napoleonic Grand Duchy of Warsaw and participated in the social reform that French rule introduced. Between 1816 and 1819 serfdom was abolished in the German Baltic provinces of Estland, Livland, and Courland. While the peasants acquired personal freedom, they were not allowed to own land. By the middle of the century, however, this prohibition had been lifted, and the peasantry could acquire leased land as personal property. The Baltic provinces and southwestern Lithuania began to develop a social structure quite distinct from that prevalent in Russia. The big estates, however, remained untouched, and most peasants were unable to acquire enough land to be self-supporting.
In the 19th century there was considerable socioeconomic change in the three Baltic provinces. Emancipation without land in the early part of the century stimulated migration to the cities. The coming of the railroad age during the second half of the century connected these port cities with a vast hinterland. Reval (Tallin), Narva, Riga, and Libau (modern Liepāja, Latvia) emerged as significant centres of export and industry and as homes for substantial commercial fleets. By the end of the century, Riga had become a port of worldwide significance. Its population grew from 250,000 to 500,000 in the period between 1900 and 1914.
Growth affected the character of the urban population. The Baltic German population, which had never made up more than 10 percent of the total, declined in proportion and importance. While German influence remained strong in industry, banking, and the professions, it was slowly superseded by the rising Estonian and Latvian urban classes in the trades, business, and civil service. The percentage of Estonians in the city of Reval rose from 51.8 in 1867 to 88.7 in 1897. That of Latvians in Riga rose from 23.5 to 41.6 during the same period.
Such developments were not mirrored in Lithuania. The peasantry in the greater part of the Lithuanian lands were not emancipated from serfdom until 1861, along with those in the rest of the Russian Empire. Unlike Russia, where land was given to peasant communes, in Lithuania it was granted to individual peasant farmers. As the tsarist government distrusted the Polonized Lithuanian nobility, rural reorganization was frequently carried out in favour of the peasantry. As a result, by the end of the century, Lithuania had become a distinctive region of free farmers unparalleled elsewhere in the Russian Empire. Nevertheless, rural overpopulation led to extensive emigration during the last two decades of the 19th century. The bulk of this emigration did not fuel urbanization in Lithuania but went, for the most part, to North America. Lithuanian cities remained small, underdeveloped administrative centres populated largely by Slavs and Jews.
The Russian Revolution of 1905 was felt in all three lands. Marxism had appeared in the Baltic provinces in the 1880s. Although a Social Democratic Party was founded earliest in Lithuania (1895), it never became as significant as its Latvian and Estonian counterparts, founded in 1904 and 1906, respectively. In 1905 Estonian and Latvian politicians joined revolutionaries in demanding national autonomy. A revolutionary wave swept the Estonian and Latvian countryside. Looting and burning of manor houses had to be subdued by armed force. About 1,000 people were shot, and thousands were exiled to Siberia or fled abroad. In the year 1905 dramatic events also occurred in Lithuania, though not as turbulent as those to the north. In the fall of that year, a congress of 2,000 delegates representing all tendencies in Lithuanian public life gathered in Vilnius and passed a resolution demanding the establishment of an autonomous Lithuanian state within ethnic boundaries.
The last decade of Russian rule in the Baltic lands was a relatively liberal period, allowing the consolidation of the national societies. The liberalization of the imperial Russian government allowed the Baltic peoples to elect representatives to the imperial parliament (Duma). Moreover, in Lithuania the prohibitions against use of the indigenous language in public life and its press in the Latin alphabet had been abrogated in 1904.