We continue the story from December 14th, 1830, when the Finnish Guard received its mobilization orders and started to prepare for a long and arduous journey to the Polish battlefields, on behalf of the Emperor and the Fatherland. [The “Fatherland” would be Finland, not the Russian Empire, right? In our hemisphere, we’re not used to those distinctions, except maybe the Canadians. And the West Indians. And the Puerto Ricans. And the Colombians. And … oh, never mind. —ed.] However, before we describe the Finnish participation in the suppression of the Polish independence struggle in any further detail, it’s perhaps best to describe those men who ended up serving as tools of the Imperial Russian war machine in the said campaign. What kind of a unit was the Finnish Guard, and what do we know of its officers and soldiers?
To start from the cold, hard numbers, the paper strength of the Finnish Guard’s Battalion was 756 men, organized in four companies. The Finnish soldiers were enlisted men; their period of service was six years, after which they could re-enlist again, if they wanted to. The social background of the soldiers varied. When reading through the Battalion’s Muster Roll, one immediately notices the number of former craftsmen who, for one reason or another, had decided to try their luck in the soldier’s profession. In the case of some, the decision doesn’t seem all that surprising; for example, the records contain quite a few low-paid and low-status tailors, cobblers, masons, blacksmiths and cabmen. That said, when the recruit had earned his living in civilian life as a glassblower, jeweller, clockmaker, book-binder or goldsmith, one can’t help but wonder what exactly motivated him to abandon his previous occupation and enlist in the Guard.
Needless to say, most soldiers had absolutely no civilian profession whatsoever. Although the Finnish Battalion was formally part of the elite forces of the Imperial Russian military, many of its soldiers inevitably represented society’s lower echelons. The majority of the rank and file consisted of young, unmarried men in their twenties from Southern or Southwestern Finland, with a background among the rural poor, sometimes as complete vagrants. Approximately 5% were townspeople, mostly from Helsinki or Åbo (Turku) and a few from Borgå (Porvoo), Ekenäs (Tammisaari), Björneborg (Pori), Tammerfors (Tampere) and other smaller towns. Only 18% were married, and most of them had married after joining the Guard. Being a soldier’s wife brought several social benefits, assuring a steady income in times of peace and support from the state in times of war.
Most of the active soldiers were too young to have had any previous military experience from the War of 1808-09 or other conflict. Some civilian specialists in the Battalion, however, were old enough to pass as veterans and probably had served previously in battle. For one example, a 37-year old commissary driver from Second Company, Nils Rörman, had served in the Swedish Royal Artillery Regiment from 1811 to 1820, which means that he had probably seen action in Bernadotte’s expedition against France and Denmark in 1813 and possibly in the brief hostilities against Norway in 1814. Rörman had returned to his homeland and joined the Finnish Guard as a rank-and-file sharpshooter, later receiving a transfer to the position of driver. Undoubtedly these older men played a part in transmitting their own battlefield experience to the younger recruits, and the expectations of the younger soldiers, was, as usual, shaped by the stories, anecdotes and folklore of the veterans.
Rörman’s case is particularly interesting also because the records reveal that he had opted to serve in the armed forces of Sweden, the old mother country, after the Russian conquest of Finland, refusing to take any oaths of loyalty to the Tsar. This, however, did not make him ineligible for service in the Grand-Duchy of Finland. Enlistment in Swedish and then Russian service in turn suggests that the Finnish soldiers did not necessarily much care who they were fighting for as long as they received their pay. Nonetheless, even though actual patriotic sentiments were still undeveloped and missing, the military service in itself may have been a genuine calling, representing a pursuit of a time-honored masculine ideals and comradeship.
With the elevation of the Battalion to the Life-Guards, the qualifications of the recruits and the demands placed on them became stricter, but it took a long time to instill former farmhands and vagabonds with the necessary esprit de corps and pride of their new profession. As late as in November 1829, there were reports of Finnish Guard soldiers begging on the streets of Helsinki or breaking into private houses in search of food. At the same time, however, the Battalion had already been able to establish a special “First Class” for those soldiers who had “distinguished themselves with their diligence and good behavior.” First-Class soldiers were not to be subjected to corporal punishment.
First-Class status was not a prerequisite for promotion; nor was getting flogged an obstacle to further advancement. On the contrary, the most stubborn soldiers who suffered corporal punishment seem to have been also the ones who were most able to show initiative and rise in rank. One such example was Hermann Simberg, sharp-shooter number 77 from Second Company, originally from Ostrobothnia. Simberg a promotion to the rank of corporal, in spite of having been forced to run the gauntlet for disciplinary infractions. [“Run the gauntlet”? Googles. Oh. Jeez. —ed.]
In addition to the draconian discipline, the indoctrination of Finnish soldiers to military life took place through their Lutheran faith. Soldiers received fifty pairs of lashes for failure to attend services. Almost all of the soldiers were Lutheran, although the rolls list a few Greek Orthodox. Johan Ihl, sharp-shooter number 112 from Second Company, had been born in Russia and was presumably an Orthodox Finn from Ingria; his comrade-in-arms Fredrik Michailoff, sharp-shooter number 81 from the same company, had been born in the Russian garrison town of Nyslott (Savonlinna) in Eastern Finland in 1796. (Possibly as a son of a Russian soldier or a merchant; the town in question had been ceded to Russia in 1743.) Some soldiers had been born in Sweden, and a few had clearly foreign origins. One extreme example was Clement Wilhelmsson, sharp-shooter number 58 from Second Company, who was, interestingly and ironically enough, born in Poland (Konunga-riket Pålen). Judging by his name and his Lutheran faith, Wilhelmsson was most likely a Polish German émigré who had, for whatever reason, decided to settle in Finland. Two soldiers were from the Baltic provinces; Christian Schellback, sharp-shooter number 8 from Third Company, was born in Livonia, and Sergeant Morten Jung, sharp-shooter number 78 from Second Company, was born in Estonia. Sergeant Jung, by the way, decided to get married after serving eleven years in the Guard; when mobilization orders arrived in December 1830, he had one year to his retirement, and his wife was already in her third month of pregnancy.
The social gap between ordinary Finnish soldiers and their officers was huge. Only nobles by birth could become officers in the Imperial Life-Guard and other Grenadier units, and the Finnish Battalion was no exception. Nonetheless, the officers were native-born, and many of them had received their training in the Cadet School of Fredrikshamn (Hamina), based on the old Topographic School of Haapaniemi, founded under Swedish rule. The Cadet School remained the cradle of the Finnish military class, and provided education for native-born officers in their homeland; those who were fluent in Russian could also complement their studies in the Russian Imperial Corps of Pages in St. Petersburg. Nearly all the officers of the Finnish Guard hailed from the Swedish-speaking aristocracy of the Grand-Duchy, and even the NCOs were usually young noblemen for whom the rank was the first step towards an officer’s commission.
A handful of non-nobles managed to gain an officer’s commission in the Finnish Battalion during the Polish campaign. One such exception was Ensign (прапорщик) Henrik Lyra, who had gained a promotion as a non-noble through the a special arrangement called the port d’epée junker. Henrik Lyra was a son of a Lutheran chaplain from Southwestern Finland, and according to the Imperial decree of 1818, the sons of Finnish clergymen who had served as an NCO for four years could become officers. Another such example was 2nd Ensign (пoдпрапорщик) Fabian Reinhold Niklas Spalding, who gained a commission simply because his father had also been a military officer; according to the Imperial decree, the sons of Finnish officers had the same rights as the sons of officers of the Russian army in general. Spalding’s father was an interesting case — he somehow worked his way all the way from sergeant to the rank of general major, served in two Swedish wars against the Russian Empire, and earned his commission and promotions the hard way. [What was the hard way? —ed.] His many formal applications for noble rank were rejected.
Differences in social background were also reflected in attitudes towards the war. Whereas rank-and-file Finnish soldiers regarded the war as a part of their workaday duty, young noblemen in the payroll of the Guard saw it as a splendid opportunity for social and career advancement. Some also saw a chance to follow in the footsteps of family traditions that extended back to Swedish rule. Take, for example, the Ramsay family. Major Anders Vilhelm Ramsay and Lieutenant Carl Gustaf Ramsay had both fallen in the war against Russia in 1808. Their grieving mother, Sofia Lovisa Ramsay, minted a memorial coin commemorating her sons’ heroism. Eventually, their story became a poem named “Stranger’s Vision” by Johan Ludvig Runeberg. Colonel Ramsay, the commander of the Finnish Guard, knew this history well, and it motivated him to match his ancestors’ exploits.
The national Finnish military tradition, as far as it existed, was still largely the “small tradition” of broadside ballads, folk stories, popular anecdotes and memories of the past wars in Swedish service. A “great tradition,” one that incorporated the substance of the small tradition into a Finnish national sentiment, was still only beginning to take shape. Frans Mikael Franzén, a poet, was already extolling a continuum of Finnish heroism that extended from the Thirty Years’ War all the way to the War of 1808-1809, but Johan Ludvig Runeberg, the author of The Tales of the Ensign Stål, would not publish his first epic war poem (“The Dying Soldier”) until 1836.
Yet even without much of a “great tradition,” an ordinary esprit de corps could often be indistinguishable from national pride for a non-Russian military unit in the Tsarist army. (As we shall later see, the Polish campaign played its part in the ethnogenesis of the Finnish soldiers.) Finnish officers wore the heraldic Golden Lion of the Grand-Duchy of Finland, not the Russian Cross of St. George. Swedish served as the language of command, not Russian. The Imperial command tried to make the switch to Russian, appointing native Russian teachers to each company, but usually the planned assimilation worked out in reverse, as the Russian teachers started to speak Finnish or Swedish.
Once the news of the Polish Rising reached Helsinki, the Finnish authorities began to equip the Guard’s Battalion for the upcoming campaign. On the day before the New Year’s Eve, Colonel Ramsay submitted his evaluation of the Battalion’s annual expenses to the War Commissary of the Grand-Duchy. He also added a supplemental estimate of the costs that would be incurred over the coming months. By the New Year, the total sum of the Finnish soldiers’ wages and equipment costs had reached well over 30,000 rubles, covered in bank assignates entirely from the Grand-Duchy’s own finances. In addition, the Finnish War Commissary paid 70,000 rubles to the Russian Field Intendenture to cover the maintenance of the Finnish Battalion at the front. These expenses made up approximately 2.5% of the annual expenditure of the Grand-Duchy. The total burden that the campaign placed on the Finnish state finances is something that I haven’t yet assessed in detail, but I suspect that it was higher; for comparison, the total expenditure of the Russian army during the Polish campaign was 97,268,000 paper rubles.
[Jussi, this economic historian is hungry for a bit more detail. How much is 30,000 rubles? What was the conversion rate between paper and specie rubles? Is 2.5% of expenditure a lot or a little? How did Finland finance its expenditures — debt issues, tax hikes, or spending cuts? What did the 70,000 ruble transfer payment to the Russian Field Intendenture include — food, ammunition, uniforms, none of the above, something else? Finally, there is a long literature claiming that the fiscal efforts needed to sustain wars was a key element in creating modern European states, and a not-as-long literature claiming that the Latin American inability to create modern fiscal structures kept its interstate wars short but made its civil conflicts interminable. How does the Finnish experience fit into those literatures? —ed.]
Meanwhile, the Polish campaign prompted the foundation of a completely new reserve company of fresh recruits for the Finnish Battalion. In addition, the Guard contracted with professional civilian craftsmen for miscellaneous tasks as gunsmiths and carpenters. [The folks at Xe would love to know more about this. —ed.] The civilian specialists, who would share most of the hardships and privations of the rank and the file, departed to the front on January 8th, 1831. Four days later, the Finnish Guard in itself began the journey to Poland. At 8 o’clock in the morning, the men gathered for Lutheran service at the barracks in Helsinki, and started their march eastwards. The soldiers’ wives were strictly forbidden to follow their husbands during the march through the city.
The exhausting march and the harsh winter were a heavy ordeal for the Finnish soldiers. The fur-coats had not arrived in time, and the men had to march in their summer uniforms in a temperature of 26°C below zero. [That’s 15-below in good American degrees. —ed.] Frostbite started to take its toll while the front was still far away, and during the first eleven days, 81 men were reported incapacitated. Of those, 56 suffered amputation because of frozen limbs. In short, weather nearly decimated the Battalion before any of the soldiers had even seen the enemy.
On January 25th, the remaining men of the Battalion received a brief respite when they arrived at Krasnoye Selo, where they were received by Grand-Duke Mikhail Pavlovich, the Emperor’s youngest brother and the commander of all the units of the Imperial Life-Guard; two days later, the Finnish soldiers paraded once more in front of the Emperor himself at the Custom-House of Narva. The break was followed by an exhausting seven weeks march through the Baltics to Kalwaria, where the Finnish Battalion joined the other Russian Guard units.
As the Battalion drew close to the front, Colonel Ramsay briefed his Finnish soldiers on the War Articles and of the special orders which the Russian High Command in Białystok had issued to maintain discipline and prevent looting and violence against the Polish civilian population. These orders, however, proved somewhat hard to enforce during the campaign. Before telling that tale, however, the story of the Finnish soldiers’ exploits on the battlefield probably deserves its very own post. Are you still with me?
I feel a bit silly to be posting the first comment on this, but, well...
Yes, the "Fatherland" refers to Finland. And if memory serves, running-the-gauntlet was also practiced by some Native American tribes, as a masculine initiation ritual as well as a method of torturing prisoners.
About father Spalding, who had earner his rank the hard way... well, Fredrik Johan Spalding was born as a son of a Finnish stock-broker in St. Petersburg in 1774. He began his military career as an under-aged sergeant in the Swedish archipelago fleet in 1783. As an enlisted man, he was promoted to the rank of an ensign in 1787, and after serving with distinction in King Gustav III's War against Russia in 1788-1790, he was promoted to a lieutenant.
He received a promotion to the rank of a captain in 1796, and began his service in the army. This career shift was nothing special, since the Swedish archipelago fleet was a separate arm from the battle fleet; this was reflected in the fact that most of men who served in the galleys of the archipelago fleet had a background in the army. He was promoted to the rank of a cavalry captain in 1805, and served as one of the adjutants of King Gustav IV Adolf in the last war against Russia in 1808-1809. He finished his career in the Swedish army as a colonel in 1812.
He applied for a formal noble rank from the Finnish House of Nobility in 1812, but his application was rejected. However, given his distinguished service history in two Swedish wars, he was accepted to the Staff of the Governor-General of Finland, and he received a post as a general-major in the Russian Army in 1820. Consequently, even though he was a non-noble, his sons were eligible to serve as officers also in the Imperial Life-Guard.
About the conversion rate between silver and paper rubles; the Napoleonic Wars had a long-term impact on the Russian finances, and the Empire didn't return to the silver standard until 1839. By then, the eventual conversion rate between a silver ruble and a paper ruble was 1:3½, with the weight of a pure silver ruble 18 grams.
To make things more confused, at the time of the Polish campaign, there were _five_ different types of money in circulation in the Grand-Duchy of Finland. The Russian silver and paper rubles were the official currency; but the old Swedish "riksdaler specie" and the new "riksdaler banco" were also still in use; and finally, there were the small banknotes issued by the Finnish Bank, pegged to the paper ruble.
(The Swedish conversion rate was fixed in 1830; the conversion rate between riksdaler specie and riksdaler banco was 1:2⅔. Sweden returned to the silver standard in 1834. The weight of the silver riksdaler was 25.5 grams.)
The average Finnish state income during 1810-1830 was (according to some hazy notes that I've made in the past, I don't have any book at hand right now) 1,438,000 silver rubles, whereas the state expenditure was 1,217,000 silver rubles.
At this time, the main source of revenue for the Grand-Duchy of Finland was still the traditional land tax, which could not be changed. The institution of all new taxes required the formal consent of the Finnish Estates, and as I mentioned in that first introductory post, the Finnish Diet was not convened again until 1863. So, tax hikes were simply not an option.
The customs revenue was only just beginning to gain significance during this period; as late as in 1840, customs revenue formed only 17% of the Finnish state income. The state did not start to pay closer attention to the tariff policy until in the 1830s, by which time the bad shape of the Finnish state finances was becoming fairly obvious. I'm not sure if this bad condition actually resulted in any way from the increased expenditure during the Polish campaign, but I guess that it's something that I have to find out.
Yes, the transfer payment to the Russian Field Intendenture included the ordinary logistic and supply expenses that you've mentioned. The initial equipment costs - uniforms and such - were covered by that first sum paid by the Finnish Senate, but during the campaign, the supply was, for practical purposes, in the hands of the Russian High Command.
(Ammunition, by the way, was hardly any kind of an issue back then - as you may recall, as late as during the Franco-Prussian War, consumption of ammunition was so small that an average German soldier was unlikely to fire more cartridges than what he was carrying in his backbag during the campaign.)
As for the classic argument how the fiscal efforts needed to sustain wars were a key part in creating modern European states... well, the Grand-Duchy of Finland had inherited its state institutions from Sweden. And the 17th century Sweden was arguably the one European country that was the most succesful in creating a modern state and administrative machinery for the very purpose of harnessing all the national resources for warfare and expansion. So, in the case of Finland, the state institutions and those fiscal structures were already firmly in place.
Obviously, by the early 19th century and especially after the Russian conquest, this military heritage had faded somewhat. So, what we're seeing is how a peaceful autonomous state, subjected to a large, militarized Empire, is trying to use its administration and its resources for an entirely new task; namely, to sustain a limited, ad hoc participation in a military campaign on foreign ground, in service of the Empire.
I'm sure that there are some comparable examples from the history of the United States; perhaps from the Union side during the Civil War? I suppose that the impact of the Boer War on the status of Canada might also be a comparable example.
Cheers,
J. J.
Posted by: Jussi Jalonen | March 23, 2009 at 10:09 AM
Your answers are fascinating, and provide much food for thought.
Regarding your last question: more modern parallels than the Boer War are what first come to my mind. Colombia trying to sustain a battalion in Korea, attached to the U.S. Army, for example. (Although mid-century Colombia wasn't exactly peaceful, the point holds.) Or Turkey's contribution to the same war. Or the British Commonwealth forces. And, later, the South Koreans in Vietnam.
Thing is, these experiences don't seem to have led to a lasting attachment to the American hegemony. Or perhaps I am reading them wrong? After all, there are British, Australian, Canadian, New Zealand, Turkish, and South Korean contingents in Afghanistan (I spent time with the Koreans) and the English-speaking ones are quite substantial compared to the size of their militaries.
Anyway, I am fascinated by this history; I knew it not at all.
Last minor point: I should have known about the low ammunition use in European wars --- but I did not. The template I have in my head is the Civil War, and while I remember learning at one point that the Civil War was most unlike the European wars of the time in terms of its industrial intensity (among many other things) the lesson appears not to have stuck. IIRC, a Civil War soldier on the Union side fired about 30 rounds per battle, out of a 40 round issue, and God only knows how much over the course of a campaign. Emphasis on IIRC.
Posted by: Noel Maurer | March 23, 2009 at 12:08 PM