In Finland, as we saw yesterday, the participation of local soldiers in the campaign against Poland ignited patriotic sentiments, at least among those who had served in combat: “May our banner call the sons of Finland to perform the highest civic virtues still in the future, to fulfill their obligations and loyalty towards their sovereign.”
Elsewhere in Europe, the bloody suppression of the November Insurrection aroused, well, different feelings. The Polish independence struggle became an immediate cause célèbre for European liberals. Casimir Delavigne, for example, celebrated the old Napoleonic brotherhood in arms between France and Poland in his exhilarating song La Varsovienne. In the German-speaking countries, August von Platen’s 1831 sonet collection Polenlieder topped what later generations would call the charts.
West European sympathy towards Poland, however, hardened Russian attitudes; even the Russian intelligentsia abandoned its criticism of the Tsarist régime and supported Imperial policy in Poland. The anti-European backlash culminated in Aleksandr Pushkin’s legendary (if somewhat unsubtlely-titled) poem, “To the Slanderers of Russia.” Pushkin’s diatribe, in particular, should be familiar to a modern reader.
(Uh, Jussi, you give us too much credit. I’ve never heard of any of the works of music or literature that you’ve cited in here. Then again, I hope nobody criticizes people in 2145 for their ignorance of, say, “Eve of Destruction” or “Bad Moon Rising.” Right? Or am I excusing my ignornance? —ed.)
Russian officials still reference “To the Slanderers of Russia” in times of conflict. During the 1999 Kosovo War, for example, the Russian foreign minister, Igor Ivanov, cited the poem in order to give a stern warning to the NATO countries. Eight years later, in 2007, the Russians once again used the poem for propaganda purposes during the Bronze Warrior crisis between Estonia and Russia.
Russian opinion determined the bounds of discourse in Finland. When news of the Warsaw revolt first broke, the Finnish minister-state secretary in St. Petersburg, Robert Henrik Rehbinder, worried that Moscow might use the revolt as a pretext to restrict the autonomy of the Grand-Duchy. Finnish worries were exacerbated by rumors that Finland might not support Moscow against Poland. The most absurd of these rumors began in Stockholm by a group of unknown Polish émigrés, who claimed that Finland was secretly ready to rise in rebellion against Russia in support of the Polish insurgents. The story managed to catch the attention of St. Petersburg, and the Tsar’s foreign minister, Karl Vasilevich Nesselrode, ordered that its origins be traced.
Finnish authorities deliberately decided to head off the possibility of a Russian reaction against them by firmly following the Imperial lead. The most concrete expression of this was, of course, the equipping the Guard’s Battalion for the Polish campaign, but Helsinki went farther than that. The most important tool of the Finnish authorities in the indoctrination of the populace was the Evangel Lutheran Church, which condemned the Polish rebellion against the God-ordained Russian authority in the spirit of the Pauline doctrine and the 13th chapter of the Letter to the Romans. A majority of the devout Finnish church-goers apparently accepted the message they had heard from the pulpits and concluded that the Poles must have had lost their minds.
In addition, under the “Political Night” of the Grand-Duchy, the nascent Finnish newspapers had to limit their coverage of the Polish events to the official reports of the Russian High Command, although the government allowed them to publish unofficial accounts of the valorous conduct of the Finnish Battalion during the campaign. That said, the Russian communiqués published in Finland did not try to hide Field-Marshal Paskevich’s brutal suppression of the insurrection. Rather, they deliberately publicized even the most savage retributions in order to publicize the consequences of rebellion to the Finnish newspaper-reading public. (How influential were newspapers at the time? —ed.)
In spite of the official efforts, Finnish loyalty was not unquestionable, and censorship could not entirely prevent the spread of anti-Russian sentiments from newspapers in Sweden and Denmark. Finland severed postal connections with Sweden immediately after the outbreak of the Rising, but Scandinavian newspapers continued to be smuggled to Finland. In 1831, for example, the Grand-Duchy confiscated over 1,000 foreign newspapers. In December 1830, a student celebration at the Imperial Alexander’s University in Helsinki raised the “Polish Toast” in favor of the rebellion. Docent Johan Ludvig Runeberg, the future Finnish national poet, tried and failed to prevent the toast as a “dangerous and demonstrative action.” Finnish officers serving in Poland were not unaware of these domestic sympathies towards the Polish revolutionaries, and the letters of Lt. Colonel Lagerborg reveal the bitterness felt by the officers towards this peculiar and ultimately meaningless “dolchstoß” from the academic intellectuals.
The most open statement on behalf of Poland was made by the 24-year old poet Fredrik Cygnaeus, a member of the “Saturday Society,” a free association founded in Helsinki to promote Finnish national culture in 1831. A year after the campaign, Cygnaeus followed the example of Delavigne and von Platen and wrote a poem in memory of the Polish national hero, Tadeusz Kościuszko. Under the circum-stances, however, Cygnaeus could not publish in Finland. Instead fragments of his work appeared under the nom de plume “Rudolf” in the Swedish periodical Vinterblommor. (“Winter Flowers.”)
In a sign of the times, Johan Ludvig Runeberg's Helsingfors Morgonblad simultaneously published the Swedish translation of Pushkin’s “Borodino” in a magnificent front-page layout on October 22nd, 1832.
Few Finns went as far as Cygnaeus, however, and even fewer fought on the sides of the Poles. One of the latter few was August Maximilian Myhrberg, an adventurer from the town of Raahe who had previously fought in the Greek War of Liberation and settled in Paris in 1830. Myhrberg volunteered to fight in the Polish army against the Russians. Myhrberg later met Colonel Ramsay’s nephew, author and businessman Anders Gustaf Ramsay, who recorded a story of Myhrberg’s wartime experiences.
According to the story, Myhrberg and his old childhood friend Adolf Aminoff — the wounded lieutenant in the painting above — met on the Esplanade in Helsinki after the war and discovered to their surprise that they had fought on the opposite sides on the same battle. Ramsay’s description of the incident is anecdotal and most likely inaccurate, but it nonetheless reveals something of the legends that characterized the memory of the Polish campaign in Finland.
Both Cygnaeus and Myhrberg were extraordinary cases. For the majority of the Finnish population, the Poles were rebels who had raised their hands against the rightful sovereign and brought their fate on themselves. When the campaign ended, the manifesto of the Russian Emperor celebrating the victory circulated all across the Grand-Duchy in Finnish translation, leaving no doubt of the indivisibility and power of the victorious Russia:
“With the help of God, We shall fulfill the task begun by our valiant armies. Through time and through Our diligence, the very seed to this discontent between two kindred nations shall be removed. Our subjects in the realm of Poland, now united with the Russian Empire, must be regarded also by you as members of the same family in which you also belong. Not by the threat of revenge, but instead by a high-minded example of loyalty and forgiveness you must aid our efforts towards a firmer and stronger union of this country with the other parts of our Empire, to our joy and to the glory of the Russian Empire.”
As they say in our more enlightened times: “We have canceled the decree declaring a counterterrorist operation. The goal is now to create the conditions for the future normalization of the situation in the Republic, its reconstruction and development of its socio-economic sphere.”
Or, if you'd prefer: “The aim of our operation has been reached, the safety of our peace keepers and the civilian population has been restored. Today we are laying a solid foundation for the broadest and most comprehensive partnership in the interests of our peoples. In accordance, our borders will be open for business and cultural contacts and quite simply for ties between our peoples. Next on the agenda are sector-based agreements in the highest priority areas. These include security, state border protection, customs, the economy, investment and other sectors.”
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. But less poetically.
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Posted by: anas | April 29, 2011 at 07:26 AM