Part I

Although the state's trust in its Baltic German minority waned over time, it was an especially privileged group in the imperial state hierarchy, especially in the Petrine and Katrine years. Baltic Germans in this period found a wide variety of roles inside the Russian state apparatus and the state tended to not interfere much in the internal affairs of this ethnic minority until the mid-nineteenth century. The were several different overlapping rationales behind the Russian imperial state's employment of its Baltic German minorities as a class of state servitors.

One important reason for the state's preference for Baltic German servitors was the perceived cultural and educational advantage that this group allegedly possessed. German language and culture, especially the Lutheran religion, tied this group to the Central European cultural sphere, and, by extension, to the West. This was clear cultural capital that placed the Baltic Germans in an advantageous position that many of the empire's other numerous minorities lacked. Moreover, the Baltic German educational system, as exemplified by such institutions as University of Dorpat, was much more advanced than most parts of the empire. As a whole, the Baltic German elite were much more educated than the empire's other nobility in the eighteenth century, making them as a class much more suitable as servitors to a modernizing state. Eric Lohr has termed one of central tenets of the Russian state's nationalities policies in the eighteenth century as "attract and hold," in which the state sought to enlist qualified foreign groups in its service and then make them beholden to the Russian state. This policy underlay the Katrine era's advocacy of German colonization of the Volga as imperial circles felt that Central European methods could make this region more productive. In the case of the Baltic Germans, there was little need to attract them as the region had already been conquered. But the state did engage in a series of patchwork methods to "hold" the Baltic Germans, namely by delegating local authority to the Baltic German nobility and upholding their local rights and privileges over the other Baltic peoples. Catherine II approached the delegation of authority towards the Baltic German nobility as part of a larger process that domesticated this influential minority to Russian rule.

But there was more to the Romanov state's employ of the Baltic Germans than just the community's cultural capital. One factor that dovetailed with the minority's purported sophistication was the demography of the Baltics which made a Baltic German political hegemony increasingly shaky without outside support. Service in the Russian state increased the dependency of the Baltic German nobility on the good graces of the Romanovs to uphold their privileges. The Baltic Germans thus possessed a virtue other minorities in the empire frequently lacked: reliability. Delegating power to Baltic Germans carried a much lower risk of rebellion in the eighteenth century as any powerful patrons in Central Europe were quite distant and the highly stratified Baltic society feed into antagonisms between the Baltic Germans, which by some estimates was only ten percent of the total population, and their non-German neighbors. This rigid social stratification helped foster a more reactionary and elitist mentality among the Baltic German nobility, which also made them more psychologically comfortable serving a Romanov autocrat. But there was wiggle room for the Baltic Germans even in such an asymmetric power relationship. Emperor Nicholas I was reputed to have said the difference between a Baltic German noble and a Russian one is that the latter serves the state and the former the imperial house. The Baltic German nobility tended to treat its relationship with the Romanovs as a personal compact between the sovereign and the the Baltic Germans as a corporate estate. This was a type of relationship that the Romanovs were ill-favored to accept as it implied a limit on autocratic authority. One of the few consistencies of Romanov nationality policies was was the notion that state authority was sacrosanct and any compromise with an ethnic group set a dangerous precedent.

Nicholas I's remarks on the nature of Baltic German loyalty was emblematic of a growing distrust of the state to this largely Kaisertreu ethnic group. Cracks in the reciprocal relationship had already appeared in the early nineteenth century as the tsarist state sought to regulate Baltic German institutions. The French invasion of 1812 opened up new suspicions of the hitherto quite loyal estate. The presence of many Baltic Germans and German emigres in the Russian officer corps was the cause for alarm during the retreats before Napoleon and a loosely organized "Russian party" faction in the officer corps blamed the retreats on the Baltic German commander Barclay de Tolly (mistakenly disparaged as "the Finn" by Bagration- de Tolly's own origins were quite mixed- he was a German-speaking member of a Scottish family that emigrated to Livonia in the 1600s). Baltic Germans were disproportionately represented in the army's ranks and the Russian party blamed them for the largely bloodless abandonment of Russian territory prior to Borodino. Although Nicholas I remained predisposed to the Baltic Germans as a special class of servitors, his administration began a process of clawing back various prerogatives and privileges. Orthodox ministers began to convert the Baltic peasantry, much to the annoyance of the Lutheran Baltic German nobility. Speransky's great project of codifying the empire's laws meant that the various laws upholding Baltic German hegemony came under scrutiny by St. Petersburg. Although delegations from the Baltic German nobility were able to persuade the court of the the sanctity of local law, the centralizing trend f the Romanov state was quite clear. The Nicholavean era also saw an attempt by the state to bind and regulate the Lutheran church closer to the Russian state with Nicholas I upholding his brother's right to appoint a Lutheran bishop and promulgating an 1832 law that abrogated existing promises of Lutheran autonomy and instead designating the Baltic Lutheran church as "tolerated church." This law subordinated the Lutheran Church to St. Petersburg and put it under the watchful gaze of the Ministry of the Interior.

Although the Nicholavian policies of the 1830s and 40s brought a definite chill between imperial-Baltic German relations, the twin events of the 1863 Polish revolt and German unification severely degraded the functionality of this relationship. The Polish revolt kindled fears of both real and (more often) imagined fears of Polonization among the Baltic and Western Provinces' peasantry and the state ramped up efforts at Russification of these groups. This ensured even more tensions between the Baltic Germans and the state as both religion and the educational policies of the region increasingly came under state, not local, control. German unification also cast a shadow on the Baltic Germans' own German identity as it was feared among Russophile and Slavophile circles that German nationalism would use the Baltic Germans against the imperial state. This climate of ethnic suspicion led to further restrictions on the Lutheran church, a Kulturkampf of sorts, and in turn fostered the very connections with pan-Germanist circles that the Russian imperial state feared already existed. Although pan-Germanism found very little converts within the Baltics, the Russification efforts of the state became a cause célèbre for Kaiserreich-based pan-Germans and romanticized notions of a besieged ancient Germanic empire on the Baltic marches soon emerged as a stock trope in these circles.