BALTIC ESTATES

Wairarapa Times-Age, 1 August 1939, Page 11

BALTIC ESTATES

POST=WAR REVISION I CLAIMS OF .GERMAN BARONS. AMBITIONS FOR EXPANSION. Germany’s ambitions for expansion in the Baltic regions are causing considerable jittcriness in Latvia Estonia, j and Lithuania, says a message from Helsingfors to the “Chicago Tribune.” Two of these nations. Latvia and Est - onia. barely twenty years old? were once scarcely more than feudal holdings of German barons. The countries wore parts of Tsaristrulcd Russia, but the real bosses were Germans. When the three nations came into being as the result of post-war treaties one of the first steps of the new Governments was to expropriate large estates and redistribute them among the peasants. Most of the so-called Baltic barons, who had been Russian subjects for years, went to Germany and became German citizens. Then they induced the German Government to make demands for compensation for the expropriation of their lands. In most cases the Governments refused to recognise the claims and the subject still is a source of friction. The area of Latvia is about 25,000 square miles. Twenty-eight per cent, of the land is arable, 30 per cent forest, and 27 per cent permanent meadow and pasture. Forty-eight per cent of all the land was owned by a few great families, the Baltic barons, descendants of those Teutonic knights who carried Christianity into the pagan lands of the Baltic and remained as land owners* MORE THAN SWITZERLAND. One man, Earon Osten Sachen. owned the whole province of Courland, which is larger than the whole of Switzerland. In the province of Livonia 132 families owned 7.000.000 acres and the peasants owned only about 30 per cent of the cultivated land. Seventy-five per cent of the Latvian population was composed of landless families, agricultural labourers, small farmers, and lessees. The Latvian Government in expropriating the larger estates allowed the owners to keep their family houses and 150 to 300 acres of land. Now all but a small proportion of this land has been divided among the new owners. Farms run in size from 80 to 100 acres and the new owners were allowed 35 years in which to pay the Government for their holdings. One cf the expropriated estates was that of Baron Wolf, who had 5000 acres and employed about twenty-five permanent workers. Wolf was allowed to keep his mansion and 300 acres and the rest of the estate was cut up into twenty-five farms, each operated by a family of five or more persons. OWN PEOPLE NOT SPARED. Latvia established 80,000 families on expropriated lands, creating nearly 55,000 new farms. A total of 4,250,000 acres was distributed. The Latvians, in confiscating the large estates, did not spare their own people. Fifty-one such estates were nationalised. About 100 men owned a quarter of the land of Estonia. Half the area of Estonia was taken up by large landed properties of about 5000 acres each. Estonia passed its agrarian reform laws in 1919, expropriated these estates and parcelled them out among the peasants. The former owners were allowed onetenth of the pre-war value of the land. The redistribution resulted in the creation of 30.000 new farms. The great landlords of Lithuania were noble Polish and Russian families, with a few native nobles. They lived on kindlier relations with their peasants than did the Baltic barons. Lithuania expropriated large estates, but agreed to make full payment to the owners at the prices ruling in 1910 and allowed the owners to retain much larger central estates than did Latvia and Estonia. Before the war about 2.000,000 acres belonged to groat land owners, but now only 3 per cent oi the land is in estates of over 125 acres.