Authors

Discussion

The emperor’s decree that abolished the Baltic Governor-Generalship in 1876 did not explain the reasons, yet we may suppose the following: 1. Intra-governmental and public discussion in the 1840-1860s produced a passive consensus that a radical peasant reform modelled after the Western Provinces could not be conducted against the Baltic Germans, so a strong general gubernatorial power was unnecessary in the Baltic Region; 2. Three provinces of the Baltic Region were institutionally very diverged and were developing in different ways, so a single macro-regional administrative unit was ineffective for the purpose of conducting reforms in these provinces. 3. The Baltic Region is close to St. Petersburg and therefore its reforms can be guided from the center via ordinary ministerial-gubernatorial channel.

The 1905 Revolution revealed the flaws of these optimistic assumptions. Governors proved to be powerless in front of the Ostzei Regime based on the Baltic Germans’ time-honored cooperative and estate privileges. Landless peasants’ economic and social situation was not improved and their rebellion was fierce during the revolution. The government decided to introduce an office of Temporary Governor-general to work out an extensive reform plan to solve the peasant, school, parish, and zemstvo problems. This was a strange decision because Temporary Governor-generals were a security authority subordinated to the minister of internal affairs and based on extraordinary legislation of the empire; policy-making was not included in their missions, in contrast to genuine governor generals directly subordinated to the emperor. Moreover, the government could not dispatch Riga able military administrators who could manage this difficult task. Without significant result the office was abolished in 1909. Nevertheless, the provincial and Riga conventions for reforms, to which the German elites and Estonian and Latvian peasant representatives were invited, left abundant materials disclosing the peculiarities of the Baltic provinces in the early 20^th century, which is the focus of this paper.