Krišjānis Valdemārs (born as Christian Woldemar; Sasmaka/Valdemārpils 1825 – Moscow 1891) was a key figure of the Young Latvian movement of the 1850s and 1860s. Since, however, his own writings – for the most part on economic or maritime issues – fell outside the discourse of Romantic Nationalism, he also has been labelled as a “national rationalist”.
Indeed, Valdemārs’s early writings, while breathing the spirit of 1848, also echo the Enlightenment thought of Voltaire, Rousseau, and Kant. His anti-clericalism placed him at odds with the Baltic-German clergy and the self-effacing moralism propounded by them, inspiring, rather, a social agenda of material and national improvement. As a high imperial official (he was the main maritime specialist of the Russian Empire’s Baltic Provinces), Valdemārs was in a position to promote a new identity for the local peasantry, Latvian and Estonian, under Russian rule – witness his treatise Über die Heranziehung der Letten und Esten zum Seewesen nebst Notizen und Aphorismen in Bezug auf die industriellen, intellektuellen und statistischen Verhältnisse der Letten und Esten, und der drei Baltischen Provinzen überhaupt (“On the maritime education of the Latvians and Estonians, with notices and aphorisms concerning the industrial, intellectual, and socio-economic conditions of the Latvians and Estonians, and of the Baltic Provinces”, 1858).
From his school years onwards, he had been a protégé of Aleksandr Arkad’ević Suvorov, the governor-general of Russia’s Baltic Provinces; consequently, Valdemārs’s political position was Slavophile, pitting Latvian identity against the Baltic-German elite: he considered the risk of Latvian Russification less urgent than that of the Germanization of the upwardly mobile local population.
In 1853, Valdemārs published a book of moral tales in Liepāja (province of Courland), aimed at a wide readership: 300 stāsti, smieklu stāstiņi un mīklas, ar ko jaunekļiem un pieaugušiem lusti uz grāmatām vairot gribējis (“300 tales, jokes, and riddles for youngsters and adults to increase their taste for books”). Around 1856, he established a learned society of Latvians (the first of its kind) at the University of Dorpat/Tartu, where, in a bold and unaccustomed gesture, he identified himself by his Latvian ethnicity, and was in touch with Juris Alunāns. After graduating from that university in 1858, Valdemārs moved to St Petersburg, where he pursued a career as state official and used his good relations with Russian authorities and court members to obtain a publishing licence for the Latvian national newspaper Pēterburgas avīzes (“St Petersburg journal”). This newspaper, more radical than other Latvian-language publications, ran from 1862 until its closure (under pressure from the new governor-general) in 1865, who accused Valdemārs of leading a secret revolutionary organization, “New Latvia”. In 1867 Valdemārs moved to Moscow, where he worked as a journalist; a year later he helped establish the Rīgas Latviešu biedrība (“Rīga Latvian Society”). As a result, he was banned from the Baltic Provinces, spending the rest of his life in Moscow, where he was the guiding spirit of the local Latvian community, and where he published, in German, his Vaterländisches und Gemeinnütziges (“Patriotic observations for the common good”, 1871).
