Ethnographic Atlas of the West Russian Provinces and Neighboring Regions, 1863

Georg Ferdinand Robert d’Erckert was a captain in the Prussian army until 1850, when he was “loaned” to the Russian army on the personal recommendation of King Friedrich Wilhelm IV. He promptly converted to Russian Orthodoxy, and Russified his name to Rodrikh Fyodorovich Erkert. He became well-known as a cartographer, and had published in 1863, by Berlin’s Winkelmann & Sohn, in Berlin and St. Petersburg, the Russian-language “Ethnographic Atlas of the West Russian Provinces and Neighboring Regions,” as well as the French-language version of it: “Atlas ethnographique des Provinces habitees en totalite on en partie par des Polonais.” Published in the middle of the 1863-64 Polish Uprising, these six maps classify populations based on language. Thefirst map includes Germans, Poles, Lithuanians, little Russians/Belarussians, Czechs, Sorbs and Jews, while the next five maps focus on individual nationalities. He considered Lithuanians and Latvians as acculturated Germans.