Russland an der Ostsee: Imperiale Strategien der Macht und kulturelle Wahrnehmungsmuster (16. bis 20. Jahrhundert) – Russia on the Baltic: Imperial Strategies of Power and Cultural Patterns of Perception (16th–20th Centuries) ed. by Karsten Brüggemann and Bradley D. Woodworth (review)

This bilingual (German/English) volume edited by Karsten Brüggemann and Bradley Woodworth seeks “to revise the traditionally held approach to Russian-Baltic relations as a uniform story of conquest, power and violence” (P. 19). In order to fulfill this daunting task, the editors have divided the sixteen contributions into four parts, each covering a certain thematic aspect of the relations between the inhabitants and local powers in the Baltic region – taken as what is today Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania – and the imperial structures of the Russian Empire. This is a very welcome addition to existing historiography of the extremely complex Baltic region, where the “Russian factor” has traditionally been understudied.

The first and most extensive part, analyzing imperial perceptions of the Baltic lands and people (Pp. 29-165) has the widest historical scope, encompassing the time from the sixteenth century up to that of the early Soviet Union. All five contributions to this part show extensive acquaintance with the primary sources in all of the relevant languages. These sources are then grouped together into various master narratives that dominated the discourse of the era in question. This part is, in the reviewer’s opinion, the most compact and informative part of the book, providing a relatively continuous chronological narrative of the Russian view of the Baltic region, especially the current territories of Estonia and Latvia.

Both Anti Selart (Pp. 29-65) and Aleksandr I. Filjuškin (Filiushkin, Pp. 67-88) investigate sixteenth-century popular perceptions. Selart looks at the claim that the Baltic coastline was a Russian “hereditary land” ([v]otčina) during the sixteenth century. Instead of considering the veracity of this claim from an angle of historical truth, Selart argues that it should be seen rather as a result of the complex and interwoven international relations around the Baltic Sea at the time. Claiming that the coastline was “hereditary” was just a way to conduct diplomacy in the face of cunning adversaries. Filjuškin more specifically analyzes the Livonian War in the same century, arguing that there was an important machinery of propaganda working on both sides of the war, spreading misinformation about the enemy, and justifying its own party. The war was depicted as much more than a simple political conflict. Rather, it was a veritable clash of worldviews and civilizations. Both chapters stress that most of the sources of the sixteenth century must be read in the context of their own time and cannot be used to justify or verify later or earlier claims.

The following chapters continue this methodological approach to the later centuries. Ralph Tuchtenhagen (Pp. 89-110) analyzes the asymmetric Swedish–Russian mutual perceptions in the eighteenth century. While the Swedes considered the Russians as the radical “Other,” the Russians were much less concerned with the Swedes, whom they saw as a minor power. The widespread idea that the Russian Empire had “saved” the Baltic Germans from Swedish “oppression” (P. 104) changed considerably during the eighteenth century, until, as Karsten Brüggemann’s chapter (Pp. 111-141) shows, it disappeared toward the mid-nineteenth century. While the positive discourse of the Baltic provinces making Russia a “European” Empire continued to exist throughout the nineteenth century, a second, negative discourse entered the scene, especially following the mass conversions to Orthodox Christianity of the 1840s. This discourse characterized the Baltic Germans “as barbarian invaders and their dominant role in the region [was] vilified as historically illegitimate” (Pp. 129-130). This engendered the so-called Russification, which was carried out primarily on a...