The Baltic World 1772-1993

Europe's Northern Periphery in an Age of Change

David Kirby

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317902171
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Baltic History
• Index: History

This eagerly-awaited sequel shares the characteristics of its distinguished predecessor -- wide geographical and chronological span; expert mingling of political, social and economic history; and Dr Kirby's ability to keep the separate national threads of his account from tangling as he weaves them into the broad regional picture that is his main concern. Here he tackles the contrasting experiences of Europe's northern periphery -- affluence and democracy in the north, stagnation and authoritarianism in the south -- from the French Revolution to the collapse of the USSR and beyond. This is a masterly study of a region that is far from peripheral politically to the post-Soviet world.

PART ONE

The Age of Empire

CHAPTER ONE

Sturm und Drang: The Baltic in an Age of Revolution, 1772–1815

STORMCLOUDS

The long series of wars which had been fought in Europe and overseas in the middle of the eighteenth century had cruelly exposed the military and financial weaknesses of many governments. The wars were followed by a period of considerable political turmoil, the beginnings of the age of democratic revolution according to R. R. Palmer, and of the ‘first crisis’ of the old regime according to Franco Venturi. Indeed, Venturi believes that ‘the first links of the long chain’ of reforms, revolutions, rebellions and repressions which brought about the collapse of the old regime are to be sought not in the capitals of the West or the heartland of Europe, but on the margins of the continent.¹ This bold assertion is open to dispute. As this and subsequent chapters will attempt to show, the ‘old regimes’ of northern Europe proved quite adept at surviving and adapting, and it is the degree of continuity rather than of change which is often the more striking feature of nineteenth-century Swedish (and more especially, Finnish) or Danish history. It was possible for systems of government to adapt because there was always present in the Scandinavian lands that element of social and political consensus which enabled reforms to be carried through in a manner which built upon the traditions and laws of the past, and which was strong enough to steer the state through sudden crisis. This consensus was noticeably lacking in the doomed Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth and in the expanding Russian empire, and it was not very evident either within the shifting boundaries of the kingdom of Prussia.

Of the northern kingdoms, it was the Prussia of Frederick the Great which seemed most aptly to exemplify the well-ordered, enlightened absolutist state in the pre-revolutionary era; and yet within a generation the edifice had been shattered by military defeat. The collapse of the Frederician state was primarily the result of weaknesses in the military system upon which it had been founded, but it also revealed for all to see the brittleness of an authoritarian system which rested on coercion, and not consensus. The monarchical absolutism laid down in the Danish Royal Law of 1665 proved to be more resilient, surviving the embarrassment of a mentally incapable (and cuckolded) king, Christian VII (1766–1808), the bombardment of Copenhagen by the British Royal Navy in 1807, and the loss of Norway in 1814. Absolutism in Denmark was formally brought to an end not by revolution, but by tacit agreement, in 1848. From 1784, when the sixteen-year old Crown Prince Frederik managed to overthrow the conservative regime which had prevailed since the downfall of the Struensee faction in 1772, the system was run by enlightened members of distinguished families, whose reforming enthusiasm helped transform Danish rural society.

The period of reform stretched over thirty years: the educational reform of 1814, which introduced compulsory schooling for children from the age of seven until confirmation, had been in the making since 1789, whilst the Great Land Commission set up in 1786 was not finally wound up until 1816. The main measures which emancipated the peasantry of Denmark were nevertheless set in train during the initial period of reform. The law of 1787 guaranteed the rights of tenants on private estates and forbade their landlords to inflict cruel punishments. One year later, the decree of 1733 binding peasants to the land (Stavnsbaand) was rescinded and a new system of recruiting for the army adopted. Further legislation established the principle of life tenancies and stipulated that the amount and nature of labour services should be fixed, with government mediation if agreement could not be reached. Enclosure of the land proceeded rapidly, and by 1837 only one per cent of agricultural land was still held in common. This also meant the end of the old, informal village government, which was replaced by the commune and its elected officials; and the new social and economic distinctions between prosperous freehold farmers and the impoverished rural proletariat were subtly revealed in the provisions of the 1803 poor law.²

The reforms were by no means universally welcomed. Count A. P. Bernstorff encountered tough opposition from the more conservative members of the Great Land Commission, and had to rely more than once on the support of the crown prince to push measures through. The peasants who, like the travelling companion of the narrator of C. Olufsen's poem Resen (The Journey, 1791), were full of talk about liberty ‘and the times we live in’, aroused great alarm amongst the landowners. A hundred and three such gentlemen from Jutland in 1790 warned the crown prince of the growing insolence of the peasantry and their diminishing lack of respect for authority, with a not too subtle allusion to what was going on in France.³ Although the government made it clear that it would not tolerate stiff-necked opposition from the landowners, it was not prepared to concede reforms which would have done away with the landlord's right to exercise discipline over his tenants, nor did it favour the abolition of labour services. Bernstorff's approach to land reform in the duchies of Slesvig and Holstein (where the first moves towards change had been taken in the 1760s) was cautious, and it was not until several years after his death that serfdom here was finally abolished (1805).

The more humane and enlightened attitude towards the peasantry which began to spread amongst the landowning classes in Denmark and the duchies helped create a favourable climate for reform, though Bernstorff and the reform-minded members of the numerous commissions also had to perform a balancing act between the competing demands of social justice, property rights and the needs of the state.⁴ In spite of, or perhaps because of the reforms, the principles of absolutism laid down in the latter half of the seventeenth century remained undisturbed. There were no demands for a revival of the estates-general in Denmark, still less any talk of constituent or legislative assemblies and foreign visitors were struck by the fierce loyalty and patriotism of the Danes they encountered and the paradox of the liberal atmosphere of enlightened reform existing under the canopy of absolutism.⁵

The outward benevolent calm of Denmark was in sharp contrast to the mood of disillusionment and discontent which descended upon Sweden in the 1780s. Gustav III's bloodless coup in 1772 had been generally welcomed as a necessary corrective to party strife which had threatened to get out of hand and drag the country down to the same level as Poland. Gustav himself declared that he had nobly refrained from exercising absolute authority. The Form of Government which was issued shortly after the coup dutifully spelled out the rights of the State Council (Riksrådet) to be consulted, and of the four estates of the Diet (Riksdag) to consent to taxation and the waging of an offensive war: but it was apparent that the balance had swung decisively towards royal power, prompting a number of contemporaries from Catherine II of Russia to the Abbé Raynal to believe it opened up the way to despotism.⁶

Although inclined to confuse the important and the trivial – trying to deal at the same time with Catherine II's conquest of the Crimea and the actress Siri Brahe's dresses and giving orders concerning matters of state and dinners in the same breath, as one adviser unkindly revealed after the king's death – Gustav nevertheless played an active role in the affairs of state, and a number of important reforms and investigations were set in motion. The currency was placed on a more secure footing, something was done about civil servants' pay, and the gradual relaxation of tariffs and restrictions on trade begun in the 1760s was continued. Torture was abolished and the number of capital offences was reduced. Religious toleration for non-Lutheran Christians was introduced to encourage immigration, against the objections of the estate of clergy and at least one peasant who complained that ‘we can never consent to this, for then the country would be swarming with rogues and gypsies and other riff-raff, who are the greatest nuisance for the common folk’.⁷ The law on the freedom of the press was however more restrictive than that of 1766, and a number of measures to promote agriculture – especially the creation of a crown monopoly over distillation – were widely unpopular.

The peasants may have grumbled about that monopoly, which was in fact abandoned in 1786, and the restrictions upon their landholdings, but they remained loyal to the king. It was in the ranks of the nobility that the spirit of opposition revived, surfacing in the Riksdag of 1778. Press censorship and Gustav's own somewhat erratic character kept the rumour mills busy in the capital. In the eastern provinces of Finland, twice overrun and occupied by Russian forces in the space of seventy years, there was talk of Gustav III having agreed to hand over Finland to Catherine II of Russia in return for assistance in wresting Norway from Denmark. Although the local authorities tried to play down the extent of this disaffection, it is clear that there was a small core of malcontents who were at least considering the alternative of seeking independent status for Finland in preference to Russian subjugation. At the heart of these conspirations was the redoubtable figure of Göran Magnus Sprengtporten. This ardent supporter of the royal coup in 1772 had broken with the king in 1778, and entered Russian service in 1786. Before his departure, however, he had presented a plan for the separation of Finland from Sweden to the Russian ambassador to The Hague, and had also drafted a constitution for Finland. There were no stirring phrases about the rights of man in Sprengtporten's draft, which was basically a reiteration of the ideals of Swedish aristocratic constitutionalism. The one novel feature, perhaps drawn from Sprengtporten's abortive involvement in Dutch affairs, was that the Finnish republic was to be a federal union, with each province having its own four-estate annual assembly and electing a congress. Congress (which in its composition resembled the Secret Committee of the Riksdag during the Age of Liberty) was to be responsible to the national parliament and was to appoint life-term ministers to the State Council.

‘That Sprengtporten in truth worked for Finnish independence I know from his own mouth’, Professor Henrik Porthan, a leading luminary of intellectual life in the Finnish university town of Åbo, later remarked; ‘but I believe that with the exception of a few madcap adventurers, he found no adherents’. J. A. Ehrenström, a former close associate of Sprengtporten, considered his support was limited to army officers with whom he had served for a number of years in the isolated frontier region of Savo in eastern Finland.⁸ The chancery-president, Gustav Filip Creutz, was inclined to discount the possibility of Sprengtporten winning over the king's brother Carl to his cause, but he was aware that growing discontent in Finland as a result of new impositions and the way in which the land redistribution (storskiftet) was being carried out might cause unrest and encourage the Russians to intervene. The king himself appears to have believed that the situation in Finland was much better than that painted by the rumour-mongers, though he did act quickly in response to this warning, ordering suspension of the land redistribution on 25 April 1784.⁹

The rumour that Gustav III intended to abandon Finland in favour of compensation in Norway was not entirely groundless. The king had indeed long toyed with the idea of seizing Norway, and tried to take advantage of the Russian plans to annex the Crimea in 1783 to persuade Catherine II to back him. Catherine preferred to maintain an alliance of the three northern powers to counter Bourbon France, and her success in the Crimea a year later obliged Gustav to abandon his idea. It was his meeting in Fredrikshamn with the empress which had sparked off the rumours that Finland was about to be handed over to the Russians. The defence instructions of 1785, which would have abandoned much of the eastern frontier region in the event of a Russian attack, angered officers with estates in the region, though the instructions were rescinded by the king two years later. The renewal of the Russo-Turkish war in 1787 prompted Gustav to push forward the idea of an alliance including Denmark directed against Russia. Count Bernstorff did not however succumb to the personal charm of the Swedish king, who paid him a surprise visit in Copenhagen, nor was Gustav any more successful in securing an alliance and subsidies from the British. By March 1788, he had decided to go it alone and an exchange of shots on the frontier in June provided the excuse to launch an attack on Russia.

The time for an attack on Russia was not unpropitious, since the bulk of Catherine's forces were tied up in the war against the Turks. However, the Russian fleet destined for the Mediterranean had not yet left the Baltic, and this proved decisive. The king's military plan had hinged upon Sweden obtaining naval superiority in the Gulf of Finland; but although the Swedes obtained a slight advantage in the naval battle off Hogland on 17 July, they were not able to compel the Russians to retire to Kronstadt. The advance of the army on the fortified town of Fredrikshamn was suddenly abandoned, and the main forces of the army withdrew to the village of Liikkala. There now followed an extraordinary sequence of events. Even before the war had begun, there had been rumours of secret negotiations between Sprengtporten and his sympathisers in the Finnish army. According to one eye-witness, the whole war enterprise was perceived as a desperate gamble by the king to restore his wavering authority; to frustrate this endeavour, the commanders of the armed forces would refuse to cross the frontier and would get rid of the king with Russian assistance.¹⁰ The ignominious retreat of the army and news of further naval setbacks seem to have driven the king to the edge of despair. He contemplated abdication, and eagerly sought to make peace with Russia. Gustav's pathetic attempts to extricate himself from a disastrous war may have persuaded some officers to go along with the proposal to address an appeal from the army to the empress Catherine, though the moving spirits behind this idea were primarily animated by dislike of Gustav III and a desire either to restore the pre-1772 system or to secure a separate status for Finland. The note drafted in the camp at Liikkala on 9 August was breathtaking in its political naivety. The commander and six leading officers of the Finnish forces who signed the note claimed that they had only realised before the walls of Fredrikshamn that the invasion was ‘in conflict with the rights of the nation’ (i.e. in breach of the 1772 constitution, which required the consent of the estates for an offensive war). Indicating that the blame for the war lay with the king's favourites and advisers, they suggested to the empress that the best guarantee of peace would be the restoration of the Swedish-Russian frontier of 1721. Finally, t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Maps
• Introduction: Northern Europe, Eastern Europe: Some Historical and Contemporary Perspectives
• Part One: The Age of Empire
• Part Two: Nations and States
• Select Bibliography
• Maps
• Glossary of Recurrent Terms
• Index