Many Eastern European peoples whose homelands share a border with Russia developed narratives in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that they were bastions of western civilization beyond which extended Russian imperial foreignness. The view within Russia proper was increasingly that the Baltic region was an “outpost of Russia.” This two-day symposium examines the Baltic region and its former German-speaking elite – Baltic Germans (Deutschbalten) – from this two-fold perspective. We seek to understand the development of these narratives among and about Baltic Germans in the late tsarist era, as well as their later afterlives.