Kevin C. O'Connor is Professor of History at Gonzaga University. He is the author of a number of books, including The History of the Baltic States, Culture and Customs of the Baltic States, and Intellectuals and Apparatchiks.
This excerpt comes from The House of Hemp and Butter: A History of Old Riga, by Kevin C. O’Connor, a NIU Press book published by Cornell University Press. Copyright (c) 2019 by Cornell University. Included by permission of the publisher.
With Riga still in the grips of hunger and its suburban districts in misery, the anxious city was flooded by Lettish and Livish peasants seeking food and security behind Riga’s walls, ramparts, and moats. The absorption of all these refugees swelled the city’s population beyond its capacity to meet even their most basic needs: in December 1709, there were some 10,455 mouths in Riga (in addition to the 11,000 soldiers of the Swedish garrison) that had to be fed. But grain from the manors wasn’t arriving, little was being sent from Sweden, and another famine soon began.
Desperate Rigans consumed horse meat as the price of food escalated through the winter and following spring. A quantity of rye that cost 1.4 thalers in March 1710 soon cost four thalers; a sheep that cost two thalers in late winter escalated to nine thalers in late spring. By June almost nothing was available, for money had practically lost its value. Affected the worst were the city’s “non-Germans,” who simply starved, while those on the verge of death stumbled through the city streets begging for sustenance. So great was the lack of food—only fifteen ships docked at Riga’s port in 1710—that Governor Stromberg resorted to coercive measures: on May 25 he detained Riga’s councilors in the basement of their Town Hall, refusing to allow them outside until they had promised to hand over their stores of grain, goods, and money. The Swedes even sent teams to search the homes of Riga’s wealthiest burghers, but inspections of the town’s cellars and warehouses revealed that there were, in fact, no further resources in the city. The siege had depleted Riga not only of resources, but of healthy leaders and hope.
In the absence of effective government, fear and hunger ruled the city. The wanton destruction of their homes and buildings shook and shocked the suffering burghers, who understandably had little wish to die on behalf of Swedish interests. With no way of knowing when the rumbling of cannons and the falling of bombs would begin, many Rigans were forced to live in vaults or basements. The blitz briefly came to a halt at the beginning of December 1709, but on the 12th a tragedy occurred that shook the entire city. When a church in the Citadel was set ablaze by some Russian strafing, two nearby powder towers exploded—“as if it were the end of the world,” wrote Joaquim Andreas Helms, a teacher at the St. Peter’s school and history’s eyewitness to the nine-month siege.
[…]
The epidemic continued to rage through the summer and autumn of 1710. Caskets being in short supply, the dead remained in their beds or on the streets for days on end. Filled with the bodies of the deceased, Riga’s churches reeked of death and myrrh, a sweet-smelling resin that was used to mask the scent of decay. The shattered city plunged into darkness, its buildings and domiciles in ruins, its warehouses abandoned, its inhabitants defeated by hunger and by the worst plague Livonia had ever known.
Throughout the eastern Baltic, the bodies piled up, the living too weak and ill to bury the dead. Claims that some 22,000 Rigans were killed during the Russian bombardment or that 30,000 or even 60,000 Rigans lost their lives to the plague stretch the limits of credulity, as it is unlikely that the city, even with its suburbs included, ever housed that many people prior to the Russian era. No less extreme is the estimation of the Latvian historian J. Straubergs, who suggested that the misfortunes of the era, beginning with the famine of 1697, claimed the lives of perhaps eighty percent of the inhabitants of Riga and its outlying districts.
When the Russians took over the city all that remained were perhaps six thousand scared and hungry souls, many of whom were peasant refugees who had recently arrived in the city. This was about half the city’s population at the time of the war’s outbreak a decade earlier. If Riga proper had become a tomb, then the undeveloped districts across the river in what is now Pārdaugava had become little more than a desert zone, practically devoid of human inhabitants. It would take until the end of the 1720s before Riga’s population returned to its prewar level.
Whatever the actual cost in lives and property, the era of the Great Northern War was for Rigans, and for Livonia as a whole, the very worst of times. From the vantage point of 1709-10, the fat years of the 1680s and 1690s must have seemed like a faded dream. It is perhaps for this reason above all that the “Good Swedish Times” came to enjoy such a fine reputation, for what followed was calamity—and not for the last time in Riga’s history. The early years of Russian rule were indeed notorious for their hardships and deprivations; it would be many years before life returned to normal in the shattered city.
What is sometimes overlooked in the standard accounts of the Great Northern War is the demographic catastrophe that all but wiped out the Livs of war-ravaged Vidzeme, then Swedish Livland. Their farms devastated, many of the surviving Livs fled to Riga, where the refugees intermingled with larger numbers of Letts. Perhaps no event did more to accelerate the extinction of the Livish people than the catastrophic war that opened the eighteenth century. Already by the early 1600s their language had vanished in Riga and its neighboring districts, but it was the Great Northern War that accelerated the disappearance of the Livish language in eastern Latvia, until then a deeply bilingual environment. If the arrival of German merchants, warriors, and priests in the thirteenth century inaugurated the subjugation and conversion of the Finno-Ugric tribes that gave Livonia its name, it was the Great Northern War that all but ensured the eventual extinction of the Livs.
Their fate would be sealed during the era of Soviet rule in the twentieth century, when the last remaining Livish villages in western Latvia came under Moscow’s close military supervision. No longer able to make a living from fishing along the coastal waters of Courland, the last speakers of the Livish tongue moved to Riga or elsewhere, while a stubborn handful aged and died in their ancestral villages.
