The troops of Peter I under the leadership of Count Sheremetyev (Борис Шереметьев, 1652-1719) actually marched over Vidzeme, instead of conquering it step by step in infantry ranks. Sheremetyev’s report to Peter, written at the end of 1702, has become famous, in which each subsequent sentence is more terrible than the previous ones. For example: “In Vidzeme, from Riga to Rēvele, there is nothing left to destroy, even the roosters can no longer be heard crowing there.” In this case, let’s not delay with “whoop, whoop, whoop” for an act that, from the modern point of view, was not a war, but a single war crime. It is only about the fact that all the robbery and murder, destruction and burning in a wide area (“from Pskov to Türbat, down the Velikaja River, along the shores of Lake Peipus to the mouth of the Narva River, around Türbat, beyond Türbat to Revele, 50 versts towards Rakveri and beyond… from Riga to Valka”) completed in less than a couple of years.
Latvian mother religion and strict nanny sect
It should be recalled that one of the first major battles of the Northern War was the defeat of Russian troops near Narva in November 1700. However, the very next year, the Russians were able to return to the Baltics not only with new forces, but also with new tactics, according to which they only rode and rode, robbed and destroyed. Less than ten years in such a regime was enough for the people living in the present Vidzeme part of the Latvian state and the entire territory of the present Estonian state to understand the hint that their previous masters in the person of the Swedish king could not and would not be able to protect them from the Russians. On July 4, 1710, the Vidzeme knighthood and the Rāte of Riga, and the Estonian knighthood and the city of Tallinn on October 10, agreed with Sheremetyev on the terms of surrender.
For the victories in the current Baltic States, Sheremetyev had really earned another portion of awards, which Pēteris did not skimp on. Among other things, he granted Sheremetyev two manors in Piebalg. There his horsemen got off their horses and created Latvians, who, according to the terms of those times, etc. manners, first announced themselves as a religious sect – the Hernhutians. This sect, subject to all external obedience to the local nobles and the tsarist state, completely took over the regulation of the mutual relations of its members by rituals and contests in feats of faith which we would now call senseless, barbaric, etc. They died out within 100-150 years, because they fit less and less in the Europe that started rapid modernization in the 18th century, which also includes the Baltic provinces of the Russian Empire. However, the will and ability of the sect members to organize their lives in their own order remained even after the sect’s demise. Its former members found themselves the next points of application of forces in which to express their originality. During the next hundred years, what distinguishes Latvians from any other people was transferred to the activities that culminated in the proclamation and victory of the Republic of Latvia. The country was created by a nation whose members are either the direct descendants of the Russians who rode out of Vidzemi, or those whose parents at various times preferred the Latvian order, if only because “there was nothing left to do to save their bones”, as Francis, a politician from the time of the founding of the Republic of Latvia, once aptly explained Kemp (1876-1952).
Newborn “whining and whining”
The appearance of the Latvian people can be dated very specifically. There is even a date, May 18, 1739, when an eyewitness and participant in these events, Hernhut preacher Dávids Sigmunds Krigelstein (1689-1760), wrote that “fire has fallen from heaven, and hearts are beginning to burn”.
May 18, 1739, however, does not stand out among other days in the first half of the indicated year, depicted by the theologian, until now the most powerful Latvian religious historian and Minister of Education of Ulman times, Ludvigs Adamovičs (1884-1942): “The Valmiera region was, as it were, “turned around and converted”. The usual songs of shepherds and taluks, as well as the obscene songs of other large gatherings (“Zoten-Lieder”) were no longer heard, but in the bushes, meadows, fields, on the roads, etc., only whining and wailing (Winseln und Wehklageņ) could be heard and seen, tears and shouting about the “time of grace spent in sins without Jesus”… The flames of the movement also spread to neighboring churches: Cēsa, Trikātas, Raunas and Smiltene. There were also preachers from among the Latvians themselves: next to Pēteris Šķesteras, Pāvulēna Jēcis from Kaugauri is also mentioned, who “from an inner drive preached the gospel with mighty power in the meadows and at the hay harvesting”.
It is difficult for modern people to understand it, it is difficult to get into the time 300 years ago, when it became a matter of life and death for people whether cheerful songs came from the bushes or “squealing and wailing”. In the first step, we will pay attention only to the moment of these transformations, for which a specific date is not important, but the fact that they took place when the children born during the Northern War had reached the maturity of their powers. They climbed over the boundaries of the spiritual life set for the peasants of that time, just as their fathers had crossed the border between Russia and Livonia.
Highlighting Vidzeme, let’s not forget Kurzemi
With the Russians, everything was simple, because they already had a country with a ruler, who employed people capable of fighting and dying in war. Latvians didn’t have anything like that at that time, because there were no Latvians themselves. However, it was a coincidence that allowed them to throw themselves around the necks of some of the Balamuts who wandered into the Czech Republic, as if they were the fathers they had never seen. Under their influence, future Latvians turned out to be capable not only of “smiling and moaning”, but also of building the houses of the Hernhutians as a prototype for everything that can be called Latvian state architecture in the direct and all the figurative senses of these words. 120 years later, very similar events unfolded in Kurzeme, no longer Hernhutians, but under the leadership of the Baptists who came from the Prussian city of Memel (Klaipeda).
The articles and interviews of Leon Taivānas (1944), who obtained a set of academic titles and occasionally shone as a media star, can be used to strengthen the conviction about such a treatment of the origin of the Latvian people. He testifies tirelessly that attachment to a religious idea is always and everywhere the first sign of people whose energy is dissipated at a lower level, but which, in a wider range of descendants, is realized in considerable transformations in everything that these people touch.
Latvian father is not “Terrible”
This time we will not look forward from the time of the Great Northern War, but back to the Livonian War (1558-1583), the lesser-known synonym of which is the First Northern War. The essence of both Northern Wars is the same – the Russian invasion of the Baltics. The similarity between the two Northern Wars reminds us of the similarity between the two World Wars, which can also be treated as one war with a truce period. The thesis about the acceleration of the course of historical time, according to which 20 years of truce in the 20th century could be roughly the same as more than a hundred years of truce in the 16th/17th centuries, is very well-worn.
In other words, the question is why Peter I became the father of Latvians, and not his predecessor Ivan IV, unofficially also known as Ivan Bargo (in Russian Грозный, also Latvianized as Terrible; 1530-1584, on the throne from 1547).
Looking at the connection between the Livonian and the Northern Wars here takes place under the insistence of an admirer or critic of the author of these lines for many years, who copies a few sentences from an interview of the anthropologist Rita Grävere (1947) printed in 2010 for all the articles on historical topics in the magazine “Kabinet” and then transferred to the electronic environment. Of course, without such a declaration of attention, he could not have left the publications dedicated to the Treaty of Niestadt, which officially ended the Northern War. On September 10, on the 302nd anniversary of the agreement, it was justified why “Putin should become the last Peter” and a week later that “Whoever wins Ukraine will get the Baltic States”. To both of these articles, a person with the nickname “Edgars” combined the words of R. Grävere, how “important it is that when Livonia collapses or surrenders to different powers, the Germans here achieve a record in the surrender agreement that one nation with one language lives here. And they are Germans. But in 1710, when Sheremetyev was already writing the surrender agreement, the Germans also wanted to write these same words about the Germans as one nation with one language, but they no longer succeeded, so Latvians already appear in this surrender agreement.”
Better two hundred years of peace than war
As can be understood from the way “Edgars” presents his copy both in the cases indicated here and in the previous ones, he thus reminds us of the enormous influence of the Russians, so that Latvians could arise and prosper until this white day. Let’s stick to the fact that the influence is really huge, both in a good and bad sense, but trying to convince the author of these lines about it is breaking into an open door.
Both in this article and previously, the Russians have been given a much larger role in the creation of Latvians than it corresponds to the ideas created by school textbooks, etc. texts. During the Soviet period, they emphasized extremely, but during the pre-Soviet and post-Soviet periods, the importance of the 200 years of peace provided by the Russian Empire was recognized, so that Latvians could consolidate from peasant farms and parishes into a nation with signs such as newspapers in one language, understood in all farms. All this must be agreed with the explanation that the publication of newspapers and articles, poems, etc. in the sense of composing works of art and entrepreneurship, it became possible according to how the genes that flowed into the territory of present-day Latvia during the Northern War got more and more new carriers, because the time of peace allowed people to leave descendants.
The role of Boris Sheremetjev in the creation of Latvians is many times greater than influencing the text of the surrender agreement between Vidzeme nobles and the city of Riga. This is certain, because no Latvians are presented in this text at all. It remains to distinguish the text of the surrender agreement and read the 30 “chord points”, a designation that has become established for this document over time. They are published in the “Complete Collection of Laws of the Russian Empire” (Полное собрание законов Россиской империи). Russian laws of 1710 (tsar’s orders, decrees, etc.) and contracts are given a place in the 4th volume of this edition, which was printed in 1830 and also ended up in the National Library of Latvia. The Russian state makes it possible to read the historical collection of its laws online.
It is likely that R. Gräver was confused by the old scandals surrounding the publication and comments of the Belarusian historian Carl Schirren (Carl Schirren, 1826-1910) in the 60s of the last (19th) century in German. K. Shirren was the chief speaker, i.e. man of letters, of the Baltic Germans at a time when the Russian tsars practically denounced the “points of the accord” by ceasing to maintain the privileges granted to the Germans in 1710. As a pretext for a change of policy, the Russians used concern for the Latvians, against which the Germans protested, because they the Latvians were allegedly taken care of much longer, better, more correctly, etc. In this sense, the parties were unable to stick to the historical truth, which in the specific case would be sticking to the text of the “chord points” without any Latvians.
God fooled the (White) Germans
The meaning of the deal between the Russians and the Germans in 1710 was that the Russians left the Germans with privileges and in return got wordings with which they would withdraw from Poland’s reminder that Poland and Russia had started the Northern War with an agreement to divide Sweden’s possessions so that Russia would get Karelia and Poland – Baltics. When the war really led to the division of the possessions of the defeated Sweden, Russia announced that the wishes of the people of Vidzeme and Estonia expressed in the 1710 treaties to surrender to Russia, not to Poland, should be respected. For such a deal, Sheremetyev got manors, where his horsemen got off their horses and made Latvians in nature, not on paper.
“Akorda punkti”, like the current Constitution of the Republic of Latvia, began with the preamble, which states that “all-knowing and merciful God has accepted as good the Christian efforts of the first Germans who came to this land and will preserve this nation and its land until the end of the world”. However, in 1939, the world did not perish despite the fact that the Belarusians had to leave Latvia.
2023-09-24 02:15:23
#Tsar #Peter #Russia #father #Latvians
