Page 40 - (DK Eyewitness) Travel Guide - Estonia Latvia & Lithuania

38 INTRODUCING EST ONIA , LA T VIA AND LITHU ANIA

Army marched through Vilnius en route to
Moscow, and was greeted by the people
as libe rators. In the same year Napoleon
returned there, retreating ignominiously,
not because the Russians had fought him
success fully, but because they denied him
supplies. In a pre-emptive move, the
Russians burned down the wooden
suburbs of Rīga to give them a clear firing
line for defending the town. Eventually,
the French army was forced to retreat.
Tsar Alexander I, with a soldier holding the Imperial Standard
A Century of Uneasy Peace
Under Tsarist Rule Under Alexander I, a series of agrarian laws
Peter the Great treated his new conquests were passed. Serfdom was abo lished
with respect, as the Swedes had done before between 1816 and 1819, and peasants
him. He continued to give the local German were allowed to buy and sell land.
community considerable autonomy, both Civil unrest, however, came from the
with their trading rights in the towns and intelligentsia in the towns who were
with their manor houses in the countryside. dissatis fied with the religious domination
After his death in 1725, a unique century of of the Orthodox Church and the
peace followed. There were neither invasions increasing use of the Russian language.
nor local uprisings. The Jews (see pp40–41), Between 1830 and 1831, the movement
who had flourished under the Duchy of was at its strongest in Lithuania and one
Lithuania, gradually sprea ding into Latvia of the counter-measures taken by the
and parts of Estonia, continued to thrive. Russian authorities was to close Vilnius
By the 18th century, Vilnius had University in 1832, in the hope
become the Jewish capital of that this would quell the
Eastern Europe, and was referred unrest. In 1864, they resorted
to as Vilna. Under Catherine the to banning the publication of
Great (r.1762–96), the Russian books in Lithuanian using the
Empire expanded to include Latin alphabet; books were
Lithuania’s Grand Duchy, which now to be transcribed into
resulted from the third, and final, Cyrillic. This encouraged
partition of Poland in 1795. publishers in Prussia to
Tsar Alexander I (r.1801–25) was produce books in the Latin
forced to forsake his dreams of alphabet and to smuggle
reconstituting the Grand Duchy, them across the border. By the
An 1864 print in Lithuanian,
when, in 1812, Napoleon’s Grand using the Latin alphabet 1860s, nationalist movements

1721 Sweden 1812 Napoleon’s
surrenders Estonia failed attempt to
and Latvia to Russia conquer Russia
Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821)
1725 1750 1775 1800
1767 Completion of
Latvia’s Rundāle 1795 Lithuania absorbed
Palace under into the Russian Empire
Catherine the Great
Catherine the Great
(1729–96)