TY - JOUR
AU - Lam, Kitty
AB - Abstract This article challenges the notion of leisure space as apolitical by investigating why the Karelian Isthmus dacha settlements, located in the Grand Duchy of Finland, served as preparation grounds for clandestine political activity. Using memoirs, newspapers and Russian archival sources, this article reveals how Finland's legal position in the Russian empire, combined with the particularities of dacha life, enabled revolutionary activity in places primarily associated with leisure. Far from being innocuous vacation destinations removed from political problems, the dacha settlements in Finland exposed the diminished capacity of tsarist authorities' actions on the fringes of the Russian empire. In the summer of 1905, housemaid Alexandra Sevastianova travelled to the Karelian Isthmus1 in Finland to work at the dacha of a St. Petersburg family. At least, that was the story she wanted others to believe. In fact, she was not a housemaid but a female operative in the Socialist Revolutionary (S.R.) party. The dacha in Finland to which she travelled was, in reality, a front for the S.R. combat organization's explosives workshop.2 Once she arrived at the dacha, Sevastianova went on to manufacture bombs without ‘[arousing] the suspicion of either the neighbours or the police’.3 The S.R.s and the Bolsheviks both used dachas in the Karelian Isthmus as hiding places while they plotted acts of terror against the Russian imperial regime. These groups exploited legal ambiguities between the Grand Duchy of Finland and the Russian empire, and benefited from a less intense security presence in places known more for rest and relaxation than for political crime. St. Petersburgers in late imperial Russian society thought of the dacha communities in Finland as idyllic spaces where they could forget the social and political tensions of the capital, but the flurry of clandestine revolutionary activities in the Karelian Isthmus prompts us to reconsider whether dacha settlements in Finland were so isolated from Russian politics after all.4 Far from being innocuous leisure destinations removed from the tide of political violence, the dacha communities in Finland exposed the diminished capacity of tsarist authorities' actions on the margins of the Russian empire. With the tightening of police control over political activities in Russia, the Finnish countryside provided an important meeting place for revolutionaries that helped them preserve their groups' mission. The dacha places in Finland, by providing an important bolt-hole for revolutionaries, enabled activists to produce explosives, store weapons and plan acts of terror undeterred. This spatial setting enhanced the effectiveness of clandestine political activity, prolonged the operations of revolutionary groups, and thus contributed to the intensification of revolutionary violence after 1905. Historiography on Finland's position in the Russian empire places the conflict between Russian governing officials and Finnish political leaders at the centre of Finland's transition from an autonomous part of the Russian empire to an independent state.5 Studies that emphasize Finnish-Russian social and cultural exchanges in everyday life treat the space of these encounters as a separate sphere of historical development.6 However, this division between socio-cultural and political space masks the complexities of Finnish-Russian relations during the period of revolutionary upheaval from 1905 to 1917. Nick Baron has noted that the classical interpretation of the Russian empire was always linked to the notion of Russia's territorial expanse as imperial space. The new history that has recently emerged adds to this interpretation by addressing how spatial issues intersected with locales of everyday experiences.7 Dacha space in the Karelian Isthmus is an ideal case for examining tensions within the Russian empire. What did it mean for dachas to be located outside of the regular reach of imperial legislation, and how did this situation intersect with daily realities? The interaction between dacha-goers from Russia and local Finnish-speaking inhabitants was an integral part of the social landscape that Russian revolutionaries exploited for their own political endeavours, prompting significant reaction from imperial authorities. By emphasizing the Karelian Isthmus dacha communities as social spaces that were part of, and not apart from, Russian political discussions on halting the revolutionary movement, this article contributes to existing scholarship by bridging the gap between social and political space. Finland's autonomous position in the Russian empire provided a specific niche for revolutionary activity. When Finland was first incorporated into the empire in 1809, Tsar Alexander I allowed the Finnish people to retain political and legal institutions established by their former Swedish rulers.8 By the beginning of the twentieth century, multiple features of Finland's position within the Russian empire contributed to the vagueness of imperial authority in the country, a factor that made the Grand Duchy an advantageous home base for groups wishing to operate outside the confines of imperial laws. The Finnish senate acted as the central governing apparatus that oversaw judicial matters. Most branches of administration such as finance and education were not subject to Russian ministerial control. A special minister state secretary for Finland was in charge of liaisons between the senate and the tsar. Russian ministers were required to consult the tsar if they devised policies that were likely to affect the Grand Duchy. A specific customs and currency boundary clearly separated Finnish territory from Russia. Most importantly, Swedish laws prevailed in Finland, and legislation could not be made or amended without consent of the diet.9 The degree of autonomy granted to the Finnish government affected the range of actions that Russia's political police could take in Finland. As Fredric S. Zuckerman noted, Russia's department of state police, which operated under the direction of the ministry of the interior, had two branches. The original branch operated within the Russian empire to detect and eliminate the threat from left-wing revolutionaries. The second branch, the Foreign Agentura (Zagranichnaia agentura) created in 1883 and headquartered in Paris, conducted surveillance activities on revolutionaries abroad, especially in Western Europe.10 The police department's mandate in Finland was not analogous to its activities in the Foreign Agentura because Finland was technically a part of the Russian empire. At the same time, the police department's range of action in Finland was limited because of the Grand Duchy's legal status within the empire.11 For example, the agents of Russia's police department could conduct surveillance of Russian subjects in Finland, but could only make requests for the arrest of individuals through the Finnish police.12 The institutional framework of Finland's relationship with Russia provided the legal loophole for Russian revolutionaries to operate in this borderland, but they needed allies to take advantage of this gap in imperial authority. The Finnish nationalist movement, which developed in the midst of the Russian authorities' attempt to centralize administration in Finland and matured in response to Governor General N. I. Bobrikov's implementation of russificatory measures, offered suitable allies for Russian revolutionaries.13 However, it is important to note that the Finnish opposition was not always aligned with the Russian tide of revolutionary activism. William Copeland argued that the Finnish movement ‘underwent a distinct metamorphosis from firm suspicion to active sympathy within a time period of only five years’. He divides the transformation into two periods: 1899–1902 represented the formative phase, while 1903–4 signalled official co-operation between the Finnish and Russian movements.14 For the Finnish nationalist opposition, the onset of russification helped change the Finnish attitude from passivity to co-operation with the Russian anti-government movement.15 It was against the backdrop of the broader co-operation between Finnish anti-government groups and Russian revolutionary organizations that the Bolsheviks established an alliance with Kagal, a group of Finnish radical constitutionalists that directed the underground passive resistance to Russian rule. Kagal, in spite of its roots in the passive resistance movement, was involved in the Bolsheviks' ill-fated attempt to smuggle arms to Finland and Russia on the S.S. John Grafton in the spring of 1905. The Finnish Active Resistance party, led by journalist Konni Ziliacus, was the most active in aiding the Russian revolutionaries in armed struggle and orchestrating terrorist acts against tsarist authorities after the 1905 revolution. This group was particularly crucial in distributing contraband literature.16 David Kirby noted that with the exception of these parties, contact between Finnish and Russian revolutionaries was forged more on an individual than a group level.17 More interestingly, the Finnish Social Democratic party, the political party whose outlook was most closely aligned with Marxist ideology, made initial contact with the Bolsheviks after 1905, but preferred to limit co-operation only to matters that directly influenced Finland.18 Nonetheless, individuals from these Finnish political groups offered several vital services for the Russian revolutionaries. First, Finnish oppositionists maintained communication between Russia and Western Europe. Second, they provided guidance to Russian anti-authoritarian groups on how best to secure the support of national resistance groups.19 Although these services did not always contribute to the success of anti-government activities, they indicated that co-operation between Finns and Russians in their efforts to overthrow the tsarist government in Russia was more than marginal. The first decade of the twentieth century was one in which news of revolutionary violence permeated the public sphere in Russia. Finnish towns that were popular destinations for Russian dacha-goers became a growing security threat to an imperial regime that was already battling widespread unrest in the heartland and elsewhere in its borderlands. Indeed, revolutionaries' use of Finland as a place for planning seditious activities spanned the first decade of the twentieth century. David Kirby emphasized Finland's role as a hiding place and escape route for enemies of the autocracy: ‘A short train journey would take the wanted revolutionary into a part of the empire where a different code of law prevailed, and where a strong tradition of constitutionalism flourished’. He also noted that Finland ‘provided a convenient bolt-hole, but it was also a place for hatching plots and holding conferences’.20 Lenin, for example, visited Finland twenty-six times from 1901 to 1917, and often sought refuge in the Karelian Isthmus dacha places, where he had acquaintances and could follow up on developments in St. Petersburg. After the London International Conference of Social Democrats, Lenin and his wife sought to evade the political police and stayed at the home of an acquaintance who lived in a small Karelian Isthmus village.21 Boris Savinkov, a leader of the S.R.'s combat organization (boevaia organizatsiia), narrowly escaped arrest in 1905 by fleeing from St. Petersburg via Finland with the help of Finnish contacts sympathetic to the revolutionary cause. He recalled, ‘I cannot forget the kindness and eagerness with which I was met by those Finns. By helping me, they felt they were helping the cause of the Russian revolution’.22 The S.R. party, which was formally established in 1901, held its first official party congress in Imatra, Finland from December 1905 to January 1906. Socialist groups also published and disseminated propaganda texts via Finland. The Russian Social Democratic party used the Grand Duchy as a smuggling point for distributing revolutionary literature from Western Europe to Russia. Iskra, one of the party's publications, was produced in Finland at the end of 1901. The Bolshevik newspaper Proletarii was published in Vyborg from 1906 to 1907 before it ceased its run.23 Russian socialists were well acquainted with the country during the first decades of the twentieth century. More significantly, revolutionary organizations established militant wings that operated near the Russian border in the Karelian Isthmus dacha places. After the S.R. party congress in 1905–6, the party's combat organization, whose leaders had previously gathered mainly abroad, chose Finland as its base. The group, which had autonomy from the party, situated its temporary headquarters at a hotel owned by a Finnish activist in Imatra. After the party congress, the organization's leaders also decided to transfer two of its dynamite production workshops (dinamitnye masterskie) from France to dachas in Terijoki, Finland. For S.R. agent Valentina Popova the idyllic countryside surrounding the dachas frequented by S.R. activists provided a good front for operating an explosives production workshop. She credited Finnish limitations on Russian security police activities for giving the workshop leaders an advantage in avoiding arrest. For example, when Russian security police came to Imatra to search the hotel where the dynamite workshop leaders and other operatives within the combat group stayed, they could not do so without the presence of Finnish policemen because the hotel was owned by a Finnish citizen.24 S.R. activists were confident that sympathizers among the Finnish government and local police would warn them of impending police raids. Savinkov remarked, ‘There could be no question at that time of our being extradited to the Russian government from Finland, and should the question have been raised we would have been immediately warned and given an opportunity to disappear’.25 Popova and Savinkov both exhibited a sense of nostalgia when writing about the assistance they received in Finland. While it is possible to interpret this bias as an exaggeration of the success of revolutionary activities in Finland, these personal recollections do provide evidence of the country as a welcoming location for revolutionaries. The Bolsheviks' technical combat group (boevaia tekhnicheskaia gruppa) was also established in January 1905 to prepare for armed rebellion against the imperial regime.26 Its leaders frequently travelled between Finland and Russia to avoid detection. For example, N. I. Burenin preferred to travel by horseback between villages along the Finnish-Russian railway, then once he reached a dacha place in the Karelian Isthmus with a smaller police presence, he travelled by train to Vyborg with other group leaders. Through his frequent journeys, he became acquainted with Finnish railway staff member Otto Malm and took Finnish lessons from him. Malm also connected Burenin with other Finns who were able to help the organization with arms transport.27 As Anna Geifman commented, although the Finnish border areas were the least directly affected by revolutionary terror among Russia's Western territories, lax law enforcement and willingness of locals to assist made the revolutionaries feel like ‘fish in the water’.28 In late imperial Russian culture, people from various social strata considered dachas to be places of respite and leisure. Summertime activities such as trips to the beach, excursions to attractive natural landmarks, hikes in the forest and socializing with neighbours were characteristic of dachas and similar recreational spaces. The dacha was also a quiet, peaceful place at which artists, writers and musicians could harness their creative talents. When prime dacha space near St. Petersburg became increasingly scarce towards the end of the nineteenth century, Russian urbanites turned to seaside villages located slightly further away in Finland's Karelian Isthmus. Peace and tranquility, however, was only one image that the Karelian Isthmus dacha places evoked. Beneath the veneer of mundane village life, these leisure spaces provided a convenient cover for plotting violence against the imperial regime. The spatial setting of the dacha communities offers an intriguing lens through which to view revolutionary activity. When considering the uniqueness of dacha places as locations that offered cover for those plotting against the ruling regime, acts of terror against the state in urban spaces provide an important reference point. Terrorism can be defined as a politically motivated method of struggle carried out by specific groups or individuals against the state through use of armed violence in order to sow fear into or cause panic among targets.29 Terrorism from below relied on psychological impact to advance ideological aims. In order to get their message across to a large audience, terrorists often committed acts in places where their actions would be memorable enough to affect a large number of people. The city, with its dense population, offered such an arena for activists to deliver their message. To be effective, terrorism ‘required both the densely populated urban spaces with a modern infrastructure and public and a tightly bonded community to sustain and be sustained by its memory’.30 In addition to being a medium for broadcasting a political creed, the city also served as a tool for masking perpetrators' identities. Claudia Verhoeven, through her analysis of Dmitry Karakozov's assassination attempt on Alexander II in 1866, argued that the urban environment in St. Petersburg offered a cloak of anonymity to aspiring terrorists. Karakozov took advantage of the St. Petersburg commoners' practice of gathering at the gates of the Summer Garden to catch a glimpse of the tsar in order to execute his plan. He was not apprehended until after he had fired his shot because he was able to blend in with fellow commoners in the city. Verhoeven credited Karakozov as the first of the nihilists to use the urban crowd as a cover, and subsequent generations of revolutionary activists had to acquire that skill to succeed in carrying out their plans.31 As Ariel Merari noted, ‘the very concept of staging the struggle in rural areas, far from the eyes of the media, weakens the significance of the psychological factor’.32 However, although the dachas were located in a more rural setting, the settlements that housed these second homes were not isolated villages ‘amid the monotony of the boundless steppes and the sea of peasants’ that Vera Figner described.33 The dacha places, which hosted a growing number of urbanites from bourgeois and merchant backgrounds, were located within reasonable distance from the cities, usually no more than several hours away by train. As Stephen Lovell remarked, the dacha was ‘an exposed and precarious outpost of urban civilization in an overwhelmingly rural and under civilized country’.34 The dacha settlements in the Finnish countryside, while removed from the bustle of St. Petersburg, remained a part of the city's sphere of influence. The dual nature of the dacha settlement as an outpost of urbanity and as a quiet retreat from the norms of urban life also advantaged revolutionary terrorists, since dacha life involved a significant degree of mobility. It was so common for Russians to purchase or rent dacha space in Finland that two Bolshevik operatives, using false passports, were able to pose as a married couple and purchase dacha property for use as an explosives laboratory.35 Other Bolshevik agents got through border inspections on the train journey between Finland and Russia by dressing in typical summer travel attire and posing as holidaymakers. One of the party organizers recalled that associates travelled from Western Europe to the dachas near Vyborg posing as foreign tourists.36 Prosperous Finnish families often invited Russian acquaintances to stay at their homes when the latter were visiting multiple towns and villages in the Karelian Isthmus. When Popova and Sevastianova were travelling through the Isthmus to meet fellow S.R. operatives in a more remote location, they stayed with a Russian contact who rented a dacha from a Finnish landlord. The two women simply told the landlord that they were guests of the Russian tenant.37 Such visits were considered normal in dacha social circles. The constant coming and going of people rarely raised alarm, and few stopped to question these frequent visits. The transient nature of life in the dacha communities, dominated by a succession of temporary inhabitants, helped strangers blend in and avoid attracting unwanted attention. The transience of dacha life was also connected to altered expectations for appropriate social interaction. Unlike cities, the settlements were places of informal sociability, a factor which contributed to revolutionaries' sense of ease. People had more freedom to ignore or subvert formal social conventions, and there were more avenues for interaction between those from dissimilar backgrounds.38 Such informality allowed for a certain degree of anonymity since it became more difficult to determine what was appropriate interaction between people of different social standing. In Finland, social stratification was not as distinct as in Russia. Peasants were an important element of local life and it was not uncommon to see local peasants mingling with prominent businessmen. This was an important component of Finnish village life in the dacha locations, where locals in all sectors of the economy reaped the financial benefits of hosting seasonal holidaymakers from Russia. One revolutionary, who knew some Finnish, relied on workers he knew at his dacha village to help him conceal weapons at a local farmhouse.39 Another Bolshevik operative hid explosive materials at the home of a Finnish furniture maker. The Bolshevik and his Finnish accomplice worked out elaborate plans for the emergency transport of these explosives in case of detection by authorities.40 Personal contacts that reached across conventional social boundaries made it even more difficult for authorities to anticipate and identify behaviour that seemed out of place. Beyond the main dacha settlements in the towns of Terijoki, Kuokkala, Kellomäki and Ollila, Russians also rented farmhouses in more out-of-the-way villages. The remoteness of some Finnish villages was an added boon to the revolutionaries. One member of the Bolshevik technical combat group used a dacha in a small Karelian Isthmus village as a place to store the group's cache of arms. He had recommended the location since his family lived there and knew the area well. The village was located not far away from the Russian border, just off the main road between St. Petersburg and Vyborg. It was not directly on the rail route but was well connected to all stations along the Finnish-Russia railway to Vyborg. This provided both seclusion and convenience for the transport of arms.41 There was no shortage of dachas in remote forested areas for setting up clandestine operations. The S.R.'s original explosive school in Kuokkala was moved to a nearby village when agents received a tip from Finnish acquaintances in the local police that Russian security agents were suspicious of activities in the more centrally located Kuokkala dacha.42 Many places in the Finnish countryside offered sufficient isolation for the revolutionaries to move about unhindered by police searches. Moreover, if the effectiveness of terroristic acts depended on the ability of perpetrators to provoke a sense of fear in places with a particular symbolic meaning for a large number of people, the dacha settlements provided the perfect location. As a place of leisure, the dacha represented peaceful respite for thousands of urbanites. Acts of political violence in such places where they were least expected delivered a powerful message.43 In July 1906, Mikhail Herzenstein, one of the founders of the Constitutional Democratic (Kadet) party and a prominent duma representative, was holidaying at his dacha in Terijoki when he was killed by a member of the right wing Union of the Russian People (Soiuz russkago naroda). The dacha places in the Karelian Isthmus had a good reputation with ‘none of the public disorder that characterized Russian locations’.44 That such a heinous transgression as the murder of a high-profile political figure could happen in such a peaceful town shocked both local Finnish residents and the liberal intelligentsia who sojourned there. Herzenstein's assassination near his dacha served as one example of politically motivated violence that had a dramatic public effect precisely because of the crime's unconventional location. The continuing escalation of political unrest across Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century contributed to the chaos within the Russian political police system. Zuckerman's work describes a highly centralized political police network plagued by a myriad of circulars and orders, leaving many provincial and local gendarme directorates aimless with lack of direction from the capital.45 Jonathan Daly attributed chaos in the police department to the fact that Russia was severely under-governed, with incoherent lines of communication across a large swath of territory. He also noted that the empire's western borderlands, including Finland, were the least controlled and most prone to harbouring revolutionary sympathies.46 Russian officials at the beginning of the twentieth century did indeed come to see Finland as a dangerous hiding place and a breeding ground for activities that could disturb the political order in Russia. Files from the ministry of internal affairs and the police department show Russian security officials' alarm about the danger that the country posed as a meeting place for revolutionaries, where they could plot to destroy the autocracy unimpeded. As Peter Waldron argued, Petr Stolypin's plan to strengthen the imperial government's authority in Finland was directly related to such fears. Imperial officials had grave concerns about terrorists committing crimes in St. Petersburg and then escaping to nearby Finnish villages, where the imperial police's authority was limited to surveillance, to evade arrest and prosecution.47 Even before the S.R.s and Bolsheviks had established their fighting organizations in Finland, the ministry of internal affairs observed developments in the autonomous Grand Duchy with a critical eye. After 1901, the ministry expanded its security section's competencies in Finland, particularly in the Vyborg province, where many of the dacha villages and settlements were located. The headquarters of the Northern District security section, as part of the St. Petersburg security section, had influence over political investigations conducted by the Finnish Gendarme Directorate and the Finnish Railway Gendarme Directorate located at border points and surrounding areas. Gendarme officers supervised secret agents in these areas and in military garrisons.48 Russian officials regularly reviewed the number of security officers stationed in Finland. A recommendation in 1904 pointed to the necessity of replenishing the gendarme staff at Finnish posts three to four times a year. It was also important for higher-level officials to inspect customs stations that were operated by lower-ranking staff members several times a year to ensure that customs procedures were followed and inspections of passengers and goods crossing the border were carried out.49 Finland was a significant point of contact between the Russian empire and Western Europe, and Russian security officials directed a good deal of attention to ensuring that inspections along the Russian-Finnish border ran smoothly, and that individuals travelling to and from the empire via Finland were scrutinized. Surveillance and heightened security controls at border crossing points between the countries were significant parts of the operational mandate for the Finnish Railway Gendarme Directorate and the Finnish Gendarme Directorate, which were departments of the Russian ministry of internal affairs police department. Instructions issued to gendarme staff on passport control at border crossing points stipulated that officials must scrupulously inspect people and goods moving in both directions. No passengers suspected of carrying dangerous materials were to be allowed across the border. The inspection of passengers' literature was also an important prerogative for gendarme officers. Staff members were instructed to confiscate books, pamphlets and other reading material inciting seditious acts.50 The instructions also specified that gendarme officials were responsible for deciding whether literature that did not appear to contain obvious political meaning should be returned to passengers without censorship. The instructions listed diaries, almanacs, calendars, dictionaries, scientific texts, travel guides and prayer books as texts that fell under this category.51 The minutiae of gendarme's instructions indicated that security officials considered the smuggling of illicit reading material to be a significant threat to the political order in the empire, and that Finland was a particularly troublesome area for such transgressions. In spite of Russian security police's heightened surveillance measures, ministry of internal affairs officials were aware that revolutionaries were still successfully planning operations in the Finnish countryside. One internal report listed a number of meetings that revolutionary parties had held in Finnish territory, many of which took place in the Karelian Isthmus dacha places. The report also insinuated that several political crimes committed in Russia, including the December 1906 murder of St. Petersburg city governor von der Launitz (who was allegedly sympathetic to the Union of the Russian People's causes) were ‘planned to the minutest detail’ in Finland. It claimed that St. Petersburg police had uncovered the existence of a terrorist cell in Kellomäki, a small parish town adjacent to Terijoki, the aim of which was to murder political figures using explosives, and that many of the operatives had taken up residence in various hotels and safe houses in Vyborg and the surrounding areas. The report concluded that dangerous revolutionaries were ‘engaged in systematic propaganda among local forces’, and had formed organizations to plan agitation and prepare terrorist acts in the empire.52 These reports were compiled from data supplied by spies working for the Finnish Gendarme Directorate.53 Their accuracy must be taken with caution, since they were meant to draw attention to the Russian security agents' concerns about subversive activity in Finland. As Antti Kujala noted, while spies and informants were recruited from among the Finnish population, most locals eschewed any kind of association with the Russian police. The Finnish Gendarme Directorate ‘was forced to recruit the majority of its agents from amongst the drunks, petty criminals and mentally disturbed elements of Finnish society. Agents quickly discovered the kind of information their superiors wanted and set about providing it’.54 Nonetheless, these reports illustrate the extent to which officials in the ministry of internal affairs associated Finland's special status with specific threats to the empire. Writers for the conservative newspaper Novoe vremia lost no time in pointing out the proliferation of revolutionary activity in Finland. One editorialist commented that weapons and arms such as revolvers, pistols, bombs and other explosives were being confiscated on a daily basis. Police efforts to stop the clandestine storage of weapons were described with alacrity: ‘Reading the chronicles every day, the gullible might think that the revolutionary bandits would gradually and successfully be disarmed, and there will soon be a time when the revolutionaries will not have a single revolver left’. But this line of thinking was erroneous and dangerous: ‘The destructive means of the revolutionaries has not and will not be exhausted since they have invented all kinds of cunning ways to hide and obtain arms’. The writer lamented the fact that revolutionaries had been smuggling arms on to seafaring vessels, and ‘neither at the shores of Finland or Lake Ladoga have we succeeded in detaining one arms transport’.55 These comments reflect the attitude among Russian conservatives that Finland's autonomous status posed a security risk to the empire. Imperial officials in charge of security found arduous challenges when dealing with revolutionary activity in Finland. Even with the assistance of spies and informants, the Russian security police were not entirely successful in eradicating the revolutionary threat in a timely manner. However formidable the security agency was, and however much energy its agents devoted to uncovering terrorist plots in the seemingly innocuous setting of the dacha, Russian authorities were hampered by the unevenness of legal provisions between the imperial centre and the Finnish periphery. This imbalance was symptomatic of governance in a multi-national empire where there was tension between centralized control and accommodation with local laws and regulations. The autocracy's security apparatus thus saw Russian socialist organizations operating in the idyllic Finnish countryside as an ominous force that, combined with the growing Finnish opposition movement, could be deadly for the regime's longevity. The ambiguity of Finland's autonomous relationship with the Russian empire severely limited imperial authorities' range of action in pursuing political criminals in Finland. Abraham Ascher has asserted that the cordial nature of the relationship between Finnish and Russian authorities crumbled in the eighteen-nineties because the latter increasingly came to see Finland as a security risk coinciding with the growth of the revolutionary movement in Russia. He highlighted the inability of Finnish authorities to proscribe revolutionary activity as a catalyst for this deteriorating relationship.56 In fact, Boris Savinkov believed that those who sympathized with the Russian revolutionaries ‘were present in all Finnish government institutions and even among the police’.57 This perception came from the strengthening of the Finnish nationalist movement, which became more virulently anti-Russian with the introduction of Governor General Bobrikov's draconian russification measures in the early nineteen-hundreds. Clandestine political activity in Finland underscored legal conundrums for imperial officials and contributed to Russian officials' sense of apprehension about their ability to maintain control in Finland. In the wake of the 1905 revolution, imperial officials' insecurity was clearly expressed in the council of ministers' assessment of the situation in Finland. The ministers were keenly aware of previous examples of Finnish animosity towards and resistance against Russian decrees, and this awareness coloured their judgment on Finnish issues.58 Their discussions touched upon the support that Finnish organizations gave to the rebels of the 1905 revolution, which included the supply of weapons and the spread of anti-government propaganda among local Russian troops. The council also pointed to the extradition agreement with the Finnish senate as an issue that hampered the political police's ability to pursue revolutionary fugitives in the country. The senate's request that Russian officials provide ample documentation before a Russian accused of a crime in Finland could be extradited for trial was cited as a noteworthy area of disagreement.59 The Russian political police's inability to quash this threat due to the legal obstacles that Finland's autonomy posed frustrated imperial officials. These factors gave Russian authorities a new sense of urgency in finding ways to integrate Finland more fully into the empire. Throughout the last two decades of the Russian empire's existence imperial authorities sought ways to skirt the limitations caused by Finland's autonomous political status. In the autumn of 1907, the council of ministers convened the special committee on Finnish affairs (Osoboe soveshchanie po delam Velikogo Kniazhestva Finliandskogo) to debate questions specific to the Grand Duchy. Discussions at this meeting reflected the frustration of government ministers over Finland's special status as an autonomous entity within the empire. To many of the ministers, this arrangement was akin to the Grand Duchy being a separate state with no ties or obligations to the Russian empire. This special arrangement, the officials believed, made it easy for Finnish officials to dismiss Russian concerns over the proliferation of revolutionary activity there. In fact, the ministers argued, other foreign states such as Germany and Sweden were much more thorough in taking measures against revolutionaries, leaving them in no doubt that had Finland still been a Swedish province, the fight against the revolutionary terrorists would have been much more successful.60 To make matters worse, Stolypin did not believe that Russia's governor general in Finland, N. N. Gerard, was doing enough to ensure that Finnish officials were taking appropriate action against revolutionary terrorists.61 The issue of security brought to the forefront the dilemmas associated with the Grand Duchy's status. The elusiveness of revolutionary groups operating in the dacha places near the Finnish-Russian border was at the heart of imperial officials' anxieties. The sharing of competencies between the Finnish Gendarme Directorate, which was a division in the ministry of internal affairs police department, and local Finnish police was a significant bone of contention between Russian and Finnish officials. Within the backdrop of escalating political tension, there was little room for amelioration in the relationship between the two police forces. The Russian political police often pressured Finnish post offices to conduct mail perlustration, and Finnish police officials, accustomed to operating within the confines of their own laws, refused to accept directions from their Russian counterparts.62 Russian security officials were keenly aware of the gendarme staff's difficulty in taking action to deter terrorist organizations in Finland due to legal constraints. They were concerned that Russian gendarmes might even be put in a position of danger in Finland because they were targets of anti-government activists' scorn and because of the Finnish officials' negative attitude toward any form of Russian authority.63 Officials from the ministry of internal affairs became increasingly concerned about the rising animosity of the Finnish population towards imperial rule, and this sense of alarm contributed directly to the Gendarme Directorate's desire to clarify grounds on which its officers were to co-operate with local Finnish authorities in the towns and cities where the subdivisions of the Finnish Gendarme Directorate were stationed. Russian officials expressed their anxiety by blaming the Finnish police, thus further damaging their relationship with country's authorities. The council of ministers repeatedly voiced its security concerns to Finnish governing representatives and issued lengthy letters to the minister state secretary of the Grand Duchy on the matter. In one such report, Russian authorities accused Finnish officials of dragging their feet in assisting Russian political police with the apprehension of individuals and groups suspected of committing crimes against the Russian state. In spite of a ruling by the Finnish senate in November 1906 to tighten the performance requirements of Finnish police when investigating major cases involving political crimes, Russian representatives claimed that it took too long for them to transfer powers to imperial authorities in order to make timely arrests of the revolutionaries in question.64 Russian officials' frustration at their inability to break through the complex and organized web of revolutionaries' organizations translated into hostility towards Finnish authorities. The ministry of internal affairs proposed a number of measures to strengthen the competency of imperial police officials in Finland. These proposals included provisions that would require local Finnish police in different parish districts to report the addresses of suspicious individuals living in Finland to imperial police authorities. Finnish police were to routinely approve Russian political police officials' efforts to conduct search and seizure at the homes of Russian subjects suspected of crimes against the state, and Russian police were to be given permission to detain the suspects without objection. Those arrested by Finnish police at the request of imperial authorities were to be turned over right away. Finally, if the investigation of a Russian subject suspected of crimes against the state implicated a Finnish citizen, then details of the case relating to the Finnish native were to be transferred to imperial officials, with notification to local police.65 These measures may have reflected the typical relationship between local police in Russian provinces and the security police, but Finnish officials viewed the proposals as a threat to the Grand Duchy's autonomy. In response to the ministry of internal affairs' lengthy list of proposals to strengthen Russian police competencies in Finland, the minister state secretary only agreed to some vaguely defined measures. These included promises to transform and reinforce Finnish police so that constables could conduct searches and arrests more efficiently, and a pledge to encourage closer interaction between Finnish and Russian police on criminal investigations.66 Furthermore, the minister state secretary argued that since 1903, Finnish authorities had made every effort to strengthen police forces in Vyborg province, where revolutionaries seemed to be most active. In the primary dacha settlements in Terijoki, Kuokkala, Kellomäki and Ollila, for example, the Finnish police bureau established two more police commissioners, two police chief constables, seven regular constables and seven supervisory constables, and authorized the activities of other detectives.67 Finnish authorities believed they were already doing everything possible to curb the activities of revolutionaries who allegedly carried out their plans unhindered in the remote rural areas in eastern Finland. They saw little need to accommodate proposals from the ministry of internal affairs. Nonetheless, Russian authorities were reluctant to accept the minister state secretary's claims that Finnish officials were doing their best to strengthen security in the border zones. The governor general underscored several shortcomings that he felt Finnish authorities still needed to address. He noted that although a previous decree by the Finnish senate in November 1906 gave provincial governors in Finland the power to arrest and expel individuals at the request of imperial authorities in relation to crimes committed in Russia, this had done little to deter the criminals. Finnish police had been slow to adopt the necessary measures stipulated by the decree, which meant that political criminals were able to evade justice.68 According to one report from the Finnish Gendarme Directorate, when Russian gendarme officials accompanied Finnish police to conduct the search of a suspect's home, the local police failed to conduct a timely search of all the rooms in the apartment while officers were interviewing his wife. During that time, the suspect was apparently able to destroy all incriminating evidence that would have linked him to a crime against the state. The ministry of internal affairs report also cited another case where Finnish police failed to conduct a proper search of a suspect's home due to the landlord's absence. The minister of internal affairs proposed that the Finnish police should be required to send regular reports to imperial officials about the performance of local police, and indicate whether they had followed proper procedure for arrest of suspects accused of revolutionary activity. He warned bluntly that if the Finnish senate still insisted on debating the issue of the rights of imperial police in Finland, Russian authorities might need to take special action. This could include emergency measures to limit the threat of revolutionaries ‘who remain unimpeded just a few hours away from the residence of the monarchy’.69 Such proposals made clear the lack of trust the Russians had in Finnish authorities. The Finnish senate rebutted Russians accusations in a report issued by a committee dealing with Russian affairs. The senate committee claimed that police, at least in the Vyborg province, had already complied with requests from imperial authorities to take stronger measures regarding Russians accused of crimes against the state. They cited a case from the previous year where the police in the Vyborg province carried out the search and arrest of four individuals in Terijoki, Kellomäki and Kuokkala as requested by Russian authorities, even though details and facts about their case were insufficient for police action.70 The senate report noted a few other successes by Finnish police in uncovering revolutionary plots: eleven people were arrested in a dacha in Kivennapa, where material for manufacturing bombs was discovered; and in July 1907, Vyborg city police raided a house where an S.R. cell was publishing incendiary literature. In December of the same year, police in Terijoki raided a Finnish watchmaker's house which had served as a warehouse for storing revolutionary publications; police in Kuokkala and Kellomäki also discovered explosive material hidden along the shoreline.71 The senators acknowledged that there had been several cases where efforts to detain suspected revolutionaries had been unsuccessful. They admitted that in one case a Russian subject arrested for holding meetings to incite revolutionary activities managed to escape from a provincial jail where he was held.72 There were some individuals among local police squads in the dacha places who assisted revolutionaries. This did not mean, however, that the police force in Finland as a whole was complicit in abetting the outlaws' activities or that the police were indifferent to the severity of the situation. Finnish authorities, both local and provincial, were aware of the disadvantages police faced in detecting and preventing these political crimes. The senators' report emphasized that Finnish authorities did not object in general to the ministry of internal affairs' proposal to enhance Russian security forces' competencies in Finland. For example, the senate agreed that Russian subjects held for crimes against the state specified in previous circulars should be extradited no later than the day after the request for extradition had been made as long as there were significant grounds for the arrest. In such cases, Finnish officials would not interfere with the procedure. Russians who had not acquired Finnish citizenship at the time of their arrest would lose their right of residence in Finland. However, the senate insisted that Finnish police should have sole power to carry out arrests, and that investigation of any of their own citizens implicated in revolutionary plots should always remain in the hands of Finnish authorities. Other provisions in the ministry of internal affairs' proposal required further clarification before the senate could discuss them.73 Exasperated by Finnish legislators' refusal to deal with revolutionary activism in a manner satisfactory to the ministry of internal affairs, Stolypin intensified efforts to curb the country's autonomy between 1907 and 1909. The democratically elected Finnish diet was dismissed repeatedly over its refusal to support Russian proposals. For example, Stolypin dissolved the diet in March 1908 because its members had voted against the Finnish senate's decision to comply with the request to hand over Russians suspected of political crimes to Russian administrative courts.74 Finally, on 10 June 1910, the duma passed Stolypin's bill stipulating that all questions affecting the interests of the Russian empire were to be handled only in St. Petersburg. In essence, this law denied Finnish political organs the power to act on and initiate legislation that Russian officials deemed to be of empire-wide interest, including selected questions relating to judicial affairs.75 In spite of the tightening of imperial legislative control over Finland, the Finnish threat to the empire was far from subdued. In the wake of Stolypin's June 1910 law, Finns became more united than ever in their opposition to tsarist measures. Revolutionaries continued to urge Finnish workers to side with them in the struggle against tsarist authority.76 The police department did not cease taking precautionary measures in Finland. The Finnish Gendarme Directorate continued to gather intelligence and supply information about alleged terrorist and revolutionary plots to the ministry of internal affairs. Although much of this information was exaggerated, and even fabricated, in order to attract the attention of Russian ministers who had begun to lose interest in Finnish affairs, this factor did not render the police department's continued operations in Finland irrelevant.77 The fact that up to the eve of the First World War there were still security officials willing to believe that the Finnish countryside was a haven for tsardom's enemies underscored the effect that previous accounts of revolutionaries' activities had on Russian security thinking. Anxieties over security in Finland resurfaced during the First World War. Records of the Finnish Gendarme Directorate in 1916 show that of the 188 gendarme officers stationed in Finland, twenty-nine were stationed permanently at the military garrison in Vyborg. Additionally, 101 permanent and temporary staff worked at the Terijoki department.78 Russian political police representatives in Finland made further attempts to augment their competencies in Finland. The chief of the Finnish Gendarme Directorate proposed in 1915 that questions of co-operation between members of the Russian security police and local authorities over border security should be revisited. He argued in favour of establishing an official agreement with local governors that would give security police from the empire sole jurisdiction over search and inspection of individuals suspected of espionage in border regions. He also insisted that Russian officials and local government organs needed to limit the rights of foreigners in Finland, and suggested widening local authorities' obligation to provide information on people who crossed the border illegally or those who planned to flee the territory of the empire via the Grand Duchy.79 The chief's proposals indicated that Russian security officials increasingly doubted Finnish officials' willingness to take necessary measures to detect elements in Finland that were harmful to the imperial regime. This mood of anxiety was also evident in the Russian security police's observations of the general disposition of the Finnish population and the situation of the Grand Duchy during the war. The chief of the Finnish Gendarme Directorate's observations of Finnish attitudes towards Russian officials presented a grim picture. He saw the country as an area of potential danger to the empire because revolutionary agitators travelled along the same railway networks as those that supplied Russian military garrisons in Finland. In addition to the threat from Russian revolutionary groups, imperial administrators in Finland also had to contend with Finnish youths who received military training in Germany and Sweden. The gendarme chief opined that such developments were undoubtedly a part of the ‘traitorous’ movement growing in Finland. He estimated that about 1,500 to 2,000 such youths had already returned to settle in the country, with approximately 200 to 300 of them living in the Vyborg province. This situation posed a threat to the Russian capital, and it was therefore necessary to keep surveillance of the population to track the movements of seditious groups.80 Even though this small number of German-trained youths who supported the independence movement had very little else in common with the radical revolutionaries besides the desire to overthrow the autocracy, the presence of both groups in the same Finnish towns further aggravated Russian security agents' frustration at their incapacity to make arrests in Finland. The picture of the Karelian Isthmus dacha zone as a hotbed of revolutionary activity stood in stark contrast to the image of the idyllic, benign nature of daily social and cultural interaction in the dacha towns. Disagreements between Finnish and Russian authorities over policing the dacha zone, as well as the increased surveillance of individuals there, cast a pall over these summer vacation destinations. Evidence of clandestine political activities eroded the image of the Karelian Isthmus as a rural utopia unspoiled by the political unrest in St. Petersburg. People did, however, carry on with their daily lives relatively unhindered by police surveillance. Contacts between Russian revolutionary activists and Finnish citizens sympathetic to their cause were strong in this region, but because most of these relationships were kept secret, they did not appear to disrupt everyday life in any obvious way. Even in the aftermath of the 1905 revolution and the Kadets' ill-fated attempt to incite popular civil disobedience through the Vyborg Manifesto in the summer of 1906, Russians continued to flock to the Karelian Isthmus for their annual vacations. Local Finnish villages continued to profit from daily economic exchanges with their Russian acquaintances. This did not mean, however, that these interactions remained completely untouched by the tensions between Russian and Finnish authorities. The presence of radical revolutionaries in these towns complicated the image of dacha places as mere holiday destinations. Many of the middle class St. Petersburgers may have found the towns in eastern Finland attractive because they saw the region as a nicer, more peaceful extension of imperial suburban space. Revolutionary activists, however, viewed the Karelian Isthmus as an attractive location precisely because it appeared as a space apart from, and outside of, the imperial authorities' reach. The wave of revolutionary violence subsided by 1909, thanks in part to Stolypin's hardline approach to hunting and punishing the government's adversaries and in part to oversights within the ranks of the revolutionaries.81 Combat groups associated with the S.R.s and Bolsheviks had already abandoned their stations in Finland by the end of 1908, though some of the individuals from these groups remained in Finland.82 Yet the eventual dampening of revolutionary activity did not mean that the S.R.s and Bolsheviks' activities in Finland were inconsequential to the overall development of the revolutionary movement. The legal ambiguities of Finnish autonomy in the Russian empire, along with disputes between Russian and Finnish authorities over policing in the Grand Duchy, made Finland an appropriate location for revolutionaries to stage their clandestine activities. By providing an operational ground for revolutionary groups, the dacha settlements in the Finnish countryside sustained the existence of such groups at a time when security officials in Russia were zealously hunting those deemed a threat to the regime. Indeed, even after the revolutionaries abandoned their activities in Finland, imperial officials' preoccupation with the country as a launching pad for subversive activities never disappeared. In the twilight years of the Russian empire's existence, the legacy of political violence that accompanied the revolution of 1905 still resonated for Russian security officials who kept close watch on developments in the Karelian Isthmus towns and villages. Footnotes 1 The territory of the Karelian Isthmus belonged to the Vyborg province, an administrative region that had been passed between Swedish and Russian rulers several times from the 18th to the 20th century. Historically, this area was part of the Swedish kingdom from the 14th century, when the fortress at the city of Vyborg was first built, to the 18th century. In the 17th century, the Swedish king, Gustav Vasa, brought the region under the influence of the Lutheran church, and the border between the Swedish kingdom and Russia became the boundary between the Lutheran and Orthodox worlds. At the beginning of the 18th century, Russia's defeat of Sweden in the Great Northern War resulted in the Treaty of Nystadt (1721), in which Sweden ceded to Russia the territories of Vyborg, Kexholm and Ingermanland. Further administrative changes followed after Finland's incorporation into the Russian empire as an autonomous Grand Duchy. In 1811, reorganization of administrative structures led to the reincorporation of the Vyborg province into the Grand Duchy of Finland (see K. Katajala , ‘Cross-border trade in Karelia from the middle ages to the October Revolution 1917’, in The Flexible Frontier: Change and Continuity in Finnish-Russian Relations , ed. M. Lähteenmäki ( Helsinki , 2007 ), pp. 70 – 87 , at p. 75 and Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC D. Kirby , A Concise History of Finland ( Cambridge , 2006 ), pp. 42 – 3 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC E. Balashov , Karel'skii peresheek: zemliia neizvedannaia, kraevedcheskoe izdanie ( St. Petersburg , 1996 ) chronicles the history of the Karelian Isthmus). Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC 2 V. Popova , ‘Dinamitnye masterskie 1906–7 g.g. i provokator Azef’ , Katorga i ssylka , xxxiii ( 1927 ), 53 – 66 , xxxiv (1927), 47–64 and xxxv (1927), 54–67, at xxxiii. 55. Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat 3 B. Savinkov , Memoirs of a Terrorist , trans. J. Shaplen ( Milwood , N.Y. , 1972 ), p. 205 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC 4 A variety of terms denote places where dachas were popular. The dacha settlement (dachnyi poselok) refers to a place occupying a small swathe of territory designated specifically for recreational summer homes. The dacha village (dachnaia derevnia) was essentially a peasant village where urbanites rented property from local inhabitants, and the dacha location (dachnaia mestnost') was usually an estate or a village where the dacha was the main type of dwelling but was not originally intended for dacha use (see S. Lovell , Summerfolk: a History of the Dacha 1700–2000 ( Ithaca , 2003 ), p. 60 ). In this article, the author uses the terms dacha place or dacha community to encompass dacha locations and dacha settlements, since towns and villages in the Karelian Isthmus such as Terijoki and Kuokkala had characteristics of both forms of land use. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC 5 For a comprehensive overview of Finnish political history in English, see O. Jussila , S. Hentilä and J. Nevakiki, From Grand Duchy to a Modern State: a Political History of Finland since 1809 ( 1999 ) and L. Puntila , The Political History of Finland 1809–1966 , trans. D. Miller ( Helsinki , 1974 ). Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC 6 Recent English language studies on Finnish-Russian social and cultural interaction include N. Baschmakoff and M. Leinonen, Russian Life in Finland: a Local and Oral History ( Helsinki , 2001 ) and Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC H. Sihvo , ‘Summer house settlements on the Karelian Isthmus as described in literature’ , Studia Slavica Finlandensia , xvi ( 1999 ), 236 – 48 . Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat 7 N. Baron , ‘New spatial histories of 20th-century Russia and the Soviet Union: surveying the landscape’ , Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas , lv ( 2007 ), 374 – 400 , at p. 378 – 9 . Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat 8 E. Thaden , Russia's Western Borderlands, 1710–1870 ( Princeton , N.J. , 1984 ), pp. 3 , 231 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC 9 R. Schweitzer , ‘Government in Finland: Russia's borderland policy and variants of autonomy’ , in Finland and Poland in the Russian Empire: a Comparative Study , ed. M. Branch and et al. ( 1995 ), pp. 91 – 110 , at p. 91 . 10 F. S. Zuckerman , The Tsarist Secret Police Abroad: Policing Europe in a Modernizing World ( Basingstoke , 2003 ), p. xv . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC 11 The Russian political police's operations in Finland are not included in either Zuckerman's study of the political police in Russia or his study of the Russian secret police in Western Europe (The Tsarist Secret Police in Russian Society, 1880–1917 (New York, 1996) and Tsarist Secret Police Abroad). C. Ruud and S. Stepanov, Fontanka 16: the Tsar's Secret Police ( Montreal , 1999 ) traces the history of the political police (okhrana) as a special section within the police department, but does not make specific mention of political police operations in Finland. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC 12 Finnish National Archives (Kansallisarkisto), chancery of the governor-general (KKK) series, He12 folder 10, reference on the conduct of gendarme surveillance in Finland, compiled by the chancery of the council of ministers, Nov. 3, 1907. 13 C. Leonard Lundin's study of russification in Finland argued that Alexander III was initially inclined to accommodate Finnish privileges but reconsidered his position when the Finnish diet and senate, the main legislative and administrative bodies, became more nationalist in their outlook and more confrontational in their dealings with imperial authorities. Imperial officials who favoured administrative russification insisted that previous tsars never guaranteed Finnish autonomy, and thus pushed forward with centralizing policies in Finland (see C. Lundin , ‘Finland’, in Russification in the Baltic Provinces and Finland 1855–1914 , ed. E. Thaden ( Princeton , N.J. , 1981 ), pp. 355 – 458 , at p. 379 ). Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Lauri Puntila argues that Governor General N. I. Bobrikov's zeal in eradicating all traces of Finnish autonomy was influenced by separatist sentiments he observed among the minority nationalities (see Puntila, pp. 61, 63). Tuomo Polvinen wrote extensively of Bobrikov's russificatory measures, which included mandatory Russian language education, the elevation of the status of the Orthodox church and press censorship (see T. Polvinen , Imperial Borderland: Bobrikov and the Attempted Russification of Finland, 1898–1904 ( Durham, N.C. , 1995 ). Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC 14 W. R. Copeland , The Uneasy Alliance: Collaboration between the Finnish Opposition and the Russian Underground, 1899–1904 ( Helsinki , 1973 ), p. 16 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC 15 Copeland, p. 18. 16 Antti Kujala describes Kagal's role in the John Grafton affair as an alliance of convenience, and characterizes the cautious approach the Active Resistance party took towards the Bolsheviks (see A. Kujala , ‘The Russian revolutionary movement and the Finnish opposition, 1905: the John Grafton affair and the plans for an uprising in St. Petersburg’ , Scandinavian Jour. History , v ( 1980 ), 257 – 75 and Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS WorldCat ‘Finnish radicals and the Russian revolutionary movement, 1899–1907’ , Revolutionary Russia , v ( 1992 ), 174 – 88 ). Crossref Search ADS WorldCat Steven Huxley contextualizes Kagal's role within a larger context of pacifist opposition against the autocracy (see S. Huxley , Constitutionalist Insurgency in Finland: Finnish ‘Passive Resistance’ against Russification as a Case of Nonmilitary Struggle in the European Resistance Tradition ( Helsinki , 1990 ), pp. 148 – 52 ). Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC 17 D. Kirby , ‘The Finnish Social Democratic party and the Bolsheviks’ , Jour. Contemporary History , xi ( 1976 ), 99 – 133 , at p. 181 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS WorldCat 18 Kirby , ‘Finnish Social Democratic party’ , p. 182 . 19 Copeland, p. 208. 20 Kirby , ‘Finnish Social Democratic party’ , p. 181 . 21 R. Taberman , Seivastö: meri, mäki, majakka ( Jyväskylä , 1999 ), pp. 47 – 8 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Lenin suomalaisten muistelmissa , ed. T. Lehén ( Helsinki , 1969 ) includes Finnish socialists' brief reminiscences of Lenin's stays in Finland from 1905 to 1907 and in 1917. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC 22 Savinkov, p. 55. 23 M. Futrell , Northern Underground: Episodes of Russian Revolutionary Transport through Scandinavia and Finland ( 1963 ), pp. 53 – 4 . 24 Popova, xxxiii. 53, xxxiv. 51, xxxv. 66. 25 Savinkov, p. 196. 26 S. M. Pozner , ‘Deiatel ‘nost’ pervoi boevoi organizatsii s.-d. Bol'shevikov’ , in 1905: Boevaia gruppa pri TsK RSDRP(b) 1905–7 g.g., stat'i i vospominaniia , ed. S. M. Pozner ( Moscow , n.d.), pp. 1 – 23 , at p. 1 . 27 N. I. Burenin , ‘Organizatsiia “Boevoi tekhnicheskoi gruppy” 1901–4 g.g.’ , in Pozner, 1905: Boevaia gruppa pri TsK RSDRP(b) , pp. 37 – 58 , at pp. 42 , 51 . 28 A. Geifman , Thou Shalt Kill: Revolutionary Terrorism in Russia, 1894–1917 ( Princeton , N.J. , 1993 ), p. 31 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC 29 For a more detailed definition of terror and how it differs from other methods of struggle, see A. Merari , ‘Terrorism as a strategy of insurgency’, in The History of Terrorism from Antiquity to Al Qaeda , ed. G. Chaliand and A. Blin, trans. E. Schneider and others ( Berkeley, Calif. , 2007 ), pp. 12 – 51 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC 30 L. Patyk , ‘Remembering “The Terrorism”: Sergei Stepniak-Kravchinskii's Underground Russia’ , Slavic Review , lxviii ( 2009 ), 758 – 81 , at p. 761 . For a more comprehensive definition of revolutionary terrorism in late imperial Russia, particularly on the distinction between the motivations and tactics of different revolutionary groups, see Geifman. Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat 31 See C. Verhoeven , The Odd Man Karakozov: Imperial Russia, Modernity, and the Birth of Terrorism ( Ithaca, N.Y. , 2009 ), pp. 108 – 27 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC 32 Merari, p. 32. 33 In her memoir, Figner points to the futility of committing terroristic acts in the rural village, since their isolation meant that there was no mass audience to observe the effects of these acts (see V. Figner , Zapechatlennyi trud: vospominaniia v dvukh tomakh ( Moscow , 1964 ), quoted in Patyk, pp. 760 – 1 ). Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC 34 Lovell, p. 87. 35 S. M. Pozner , ‘Iz istorii boevoi tekhniki, shkola v Kuokkala’, in Pervaia boevaia organizatsiia Bol'shevikov 1905–7 g.g. , ed. S. M. Pozner ( Moscow , 1934 ), pp. 232 – 44 , at p. 233 ; Popova, xxxiii., 55–6. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC 36 Burenin, pp. 42, 55. 37 Popova, xxxiii. 56. 38 Lovell, p. 101. 39 Ignatiev, p. 78. 40 V. Smirnov , ‘Rabota v Finliandii’ , in Pozner, Pervaia boevaia organizatsiia Bol'shevikov , pp. 83 – 6 , at p. 85 . 41 A. Ignatiev , ‘Vospominaniia organizatora’ , in Pozner, Pervaia boevaia organizatsiia Bol'shevikov , pp. 77 – 83 . 42 Pozner , ‘Iz istorii boevoi tekhniki, shkola v Kuokkala’ , p. 238 . 43 Verhoeven has argued that as part of the spatial dimension of terrorism, ‘at any moment, otherwise familiar territory can be estranged when, suddenly, an undetected (disguised, camouflaged) enemy appears out of nowhere, acts and disappears again’ (Verhoeven, p. 106). 44 Lovell, p. 112. 45 Zuckerman , Tsarist Secret Police in Russian Society , p. 154 . 46 J. W. Daly , The Watchful State: Security Police and Opposition in Russia 1906–17 ( DeKalb, Ill. , 2004 ), p. 5 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC 47 P. Waldron , ‘Stolypin and Finland’ , Slavonic and East European Rev. , lxiii ( 1985 ), 41 – 55 , at p. 45 . Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat 48 I. Lauchlan , Russian Hide-and-Seek: the Tsarist Secret Police in St. Petersburg, 1906–14 ( Helsinki , 2002 ) describes the role of the Finnish divisions of the political police within the larger structure of the Special Department, while Daly's The Watchful State makes several references to the Russian political police's presence in Finland at the beginning of the 20th century. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC 49 Moscow, State Archive of the Russian Federation (Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii, hereafter G.A.R.F.), f. 494, op. 7, d. 1, l. 594, circular from the Finnish Gendarme Directorate, 12 May 1904. 50 G.A.R.F., f. 494, op. 1, d. 21, ll. 20–22, instructions to the staff of the Finnish Gendarme Directorate on passport control, May 1904. 51 G.A.R.F., f. 494, op. 1, d. 21, l. 30, instructions to the staff of the Finnish Gendarme Directorate on passport control, May 1904. 52 St. Petersburg, Russian State Historical Archive (Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Istoricheskii Arkhiv, hereafter R.G.I.A.), f. 1361, op. 1, d. 59, l. 1, report from the minister of internal affairs to minister state secretary for Finland, 5 Dec. 1907. 53 The police department regularly used spies to penetrate revolutionary organizations in Russia. Evno Azef, a leader of the S.R. combat organization, was a notorious double agent who had been working for the security police since 1893. While in service to the police, he also allegedly played a leading role in orchestrating the assassinations of the minister of internal affairs V. K. Plehve in July 1904 and several other prominent imperial officials (see A. Ascher , P. A. Stolypin: the Search for Stability in Late Imperial Russia ( Stanford, Calif. , 2001 ), pp. 70 – 5 , Geifman, pp. 232–7, and Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC L. G. Praisman , Terroristy i revoliutsionery, okhranniki i provokatory ( Moscow , 2001 )). As leader of the S.R.'s combat organization, he oversaw some of the organization's work in Terijoki, and met with operatives in the Karelian Isthmus on several occasions. The Finnish Gendarme Directorate, however, was not quite so successful in recruiting such high-profile informants. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC 54 A. Kujala , ‘The policy of the Russian government toward Finland, 1905–17: a case study of the nationalities question in the last years of the Russian empire’, in Emerging Democracy in Late Imperial Russia , ed. M. S. Conroy ( Niwot, Colo. , 1998 ), pp. 143 – 97 , at p. 162 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC 55 ‘Gde revoliutsionery khraniat oruzhie?’ , Novoe vremia , 30 Aug. 1906 . 56 Ascher, p. 304. 57 Savinkov, p. 196. 58 The more memorable instances of Finnish defiance of Russian decrees stemmed from the period of N. I. Bobrikov's tenure as governor general. When Bobrikov introduced several regulations for enacting imperial legislation in Finland in Feb. 1899, which later became known as the February Manifesto, many Finns saw these regulations as a direct infringement on their autonomy. Historians of Finland have generally attributed the birth of widespread resistance to Russian rule to reactions against the February Manifesto and subsequent decrees. For example, the military service law of 1901, which introduced selective conscription of Finnish citizens, resulted in prolonged passive resistance (see Finland and Russia 1808–1920, from Autonomy to Independence: a Selection of Documents , ed. D. Kirby ( 1975 ), pp. 69 – 70 ). Crossref Search ADS In 1904, a disgruntled student, Eugen Schauman, assassinated Bobrikov. Although he acted alone, many within the passive resistance movement hailed the assassination ‘as the deed of a selfless patriot’ (see Kirby , Concise History of Finland , p. 141 ). Crossref Search ADS From Oct.–Nov. 1905, a general strike in the name of Finnish nationalism spread across the country, affecting much of the country's infrastructure (see C. Lundin , ‘The storm breaks and rages’, in Russification in the Baltic Provinces and Finland , ed. E. Thaden ( Princeton, N.J. , 1981 ), pp. 419 – 446 , at p. 444 ). Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC 59 R.G.I.A., f. 1276, op. 18, d. 57, ll. 5–8, general report of the special committee on Finnish affairs, Nov. 1907. 60 R.G.I.A., f. 1276, op. 18, d. 57, l. 5, general report of the special committee on Finnish affairs, Nov. 1907. 61 Kujala, pp. 148–9. Gerard served as governor general in Finland from Dec. 1905 to Feb. 1908. 62 Futrell, pp. 54–5. 63 R.G.I.A., f. 1276, op. 18, d. 57, l. 22, general report of the special committee on Finnish affairs, Nov. 1907. 64 R.G.I.A., f. 1361, op. 1, d. 59, ll. 2–3, letter from the council of ministers to the minister state secretary for Finland, 5 Dec. 1907. 65 R.G.I.A., f. 1361, op. 1, d. 59, ll. 6–8, letter from the council of ministers to the minister state secretary for Finland, 5 Dec. 1907. 66 R.G.I.A., f. 1361, op. 1, d. 59, l. 21, letter from the minister state secretary to the minister of internal affairs, 31 Dec. 1907. 67 R.G.I.A., f. 1361, op. 1, d. 59, l. 23, letter from the minister state secretary to the minister of internal affairs, 31 Dec. 1907. 68 R.G.I.A., f. 1361, op. 1, d. 59, l. 29, letter from the governor general of Finland to the minister state secretary, 18 Jan. 1908. 69 R.G.I.A., f. 1361, op. 1, d. 59, ll. 45–6, letter from the minister of internal affairs to the minister state secretary, 1 Feb. 1908. 70 R.G.I.A., f. 1361, op. 1, d. 59, l. 72, report from the Finnish senate to the Finnish governor general, 21 March 1908. 71 R.G.I.A., f. 1361, op. 1, d. 59, l. 73, report from the Finnish senate to the Finnish governor general, 21 March 1908. 72 R.G.I.A., f. 1361, op. 1, d. 59, ll. 74–5, report from the Finnish senate to the Finnish governor general, 21 March 1908. 73 R.G.I.A., f. 1361, op. 1, d. 59, ll. 76–7, report from the Finnish senate to the Finnish governor general, 21 March 1908. 74 Ascher, p. 309. 75 Kirby , Finland and Russia , p. 123 . The Kharitonov Commission was a 1909 Finnish-Russian committee charged with the task of resolving differences in the judicial-legal relationship between Finland and Russia. The Russian members of the committee espoused the following viewpoint: ‘The fundamental laws of the Empire have the same validity in Finland as in other parts of the Empire. Fundamental laws provided for Finland are valid only for its internal affairs’. The Stolypin law of June 1910 was based on the Russian reports from this committee. The law was broad enough to give Russian officials more leeway in determining which legal issues were to be treated as affairs of interest to the empire (e.g., extradition and the prosecution of Russians who committed political crimes in Finland) (see Document 79, ‘Résumé of the viewpoints of the Finnish and Russian members of the Kharitonov Committee on Russo-Finnish relations’, in Kirby, Finland and Russia, p. 129). 76 Kirby , Russia and Finland , p. 124 . 77 Kujala notes that an investigation of the Finnish Gendarme Directorate in 1912 revealed that a number of reports of rebellious plans by opposition groups were forged by opportunistic agents (see Kujala, pp. 161–2). 78 G.A.R.F., f. 495, op. 1, d. 11, l. 12, report of the chief of the Finnish Railway Gendarme Directorate, 18 Sept. 1916, and ll. 34–5, report of the Finnish Railway Gendarme Directorate, 5 Nov. 1916. 79 G.A.R.F., f. 494, op. 3, d. 1, l. 3, secret circular of the Finnish Gendarme Directorate, 6 March 1915. 80 G.A.R.F., f. 494, op. 1, d. 5, ll. 1–5, observations of the chief of the Finnish Gendarme Directorate on the local population in Finland, 23 Sept. 1916. 81 From 1905, the government began placing many regions across the empire under a state of martial law or extraordinary security, and military courts were given the authority to try political crimes. The revolutionaries themselves blamed Stolypin's harsh measures for their failures. Furthermore, the revelation in 1909 that Evno Azef was a double agent significantly damaged the S.R.'s morale. Other revolutionaries still pursued terrorism as a viable strategy, but these acts were much more infrequent after the so-called Azef affair (see Geifman, pp. 227, 231, 236–7). 82 Kujala, p. 160. © 2017 Institute of Historical Research This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model) © 2017 Institute of Historical Research
TI - Russia's revolutionaries on vacation: anti-government activities in the Finnish countryside, 1900–17
JO - Historical Research
DO - 10.1111/1468-2281.12155
DA - 2017-02-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/russia-s-revolutionaries-on-vacation-anti-government-activities-in-the-0XCdPhVUGw
SP - 57
EP - 75
VL - 90
IS - 247
DP - DeepDyve
ER -