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This article deals with Russian Orthodoxy in the Baltic Provinces of the Russian empire, a topic rarely addressed in scholarly literature that usually focuses on Lutheran Estonians and Latvians whereas their orthodox compatriots are neglected. However, the scope of this text is limited since it concentrates on the question if orthodoxy actually brought Estonians and Latvians closer to Russia. In other words, did Orthodoxy play the role ascribed to it in Russian nationalist discourse, namely did it “russify” the Baltic provinces? After a short discussion of the emergence of Orthodoxy as a religious factor in the region during the mass conversions of Estonians and Latvians in the 1840s, the article provides some basic information about the orthodox population of the Baltic Provinces. Then it goes on to introduce the Riga Theological Seminary established in 1850 as a school for the local orthodox clergy initially meant for Russians, but also for Estonians and Latvians. However, according to an anonymous brochure supposedly written by an orthodox Latvian in 1882, there were many conflicts on ethnic grounds among the orthodox elites in the Baltic provinces. This brochure namely defended the impact of Estonians and Latvians on the Riga Seminary against accusations of their Russian brothers in faith who blamed all problems of Orthodoxy in the Baltic provinces solely on the non-Russian clergy. Although we still do not know enough about the history of this institution, it is indicative of the self-awareness of the seminarists of local origin that the anonymous author uses one of the key-terms of the Russian “language of assimilation” (Austin Jersild), “sblizhenie” (“confluence”), in a quite unusual way since in his usage, priests of Russian origin in the Baltic borderland had to adapt oneself to local circumstances. Thus even people who supposedly were chosen by the Russian imperial elites as proponents of Russia’s mission in the non-Russian peripheries, already prior to Alexander’s III centralising reforms in the Baltic provinces decidedly protested against any attempts to simply impose Russian customs and traditions on the local environment. When in 1908 a congress of the Riga eparchy seriously debated the introduction of Lutheran patterns of choir singing in orthodox services in order to make the latter more attractive to the local population, it thus admitted quite pragmatically that the orthodox objective in the Baltic provinces should only be to save and to care for what had already been achieved. As the conclusion shows, however, still on the eve of the First World War in orthodox discourse a “natural” form of Russification of Estonians and Latvians remained the ultimate goal of the imperial orthodox idea. As this paper argues, this vision considerably underestimated the level of self-awareness reached by Estonians and Latvians already by the 1880s.