AH Vignette: The Ghosts of Sveaborg
It was a beautiful July morning on the southern coast of the Finnish Republic. I met the old man at the docks after the rickety little ferry had left me in front of a long old building with what looked like peeling imperial era paint on it. The ferry was well on its way back towards the mainland when the man stepped into view from a nearby doorway and raised his hand in a perfunctory salute. With his scruffy beard and mostly bald head, he looked almost like a monk. The feeling was enhanced by his long coat that looked like flowing robes in the fresh summer breeze.
” - You the journalist, eh?”, the man asked as I got closer.
Somehow, he had got word of my arrival beforehand. I had not expected something like that.
*
The island fortress of Sveaborg was originally created by the Swedish realm to bolster the defence of the Finnish southern coast against the advances of the Russians in the mid-18th century. Under the fortifications expert, Augustin Ehrensvärd, the fortress was built into what at the time was a modern coastal defence system on six islands, even though it was never realized to the extent the Swedish officer himself had envisioned it. Here also a military shipyard was created, and under the tutelage of Ehrensvärd and his collaborator, the shipbuilder Fredrik Henrik af Chapman, the Swedish would build a big part of a new kind of an archipelago fleet of small sailing ships and galleys that were specifically designed to defend the broken, shallow waters of the Finnish coast in the face of the threat presented by the growing Russian fleet.
The Sveaborg sea fortress would see its moment of glory during the Russo-Swedish war of 1807-1810, the so-called Finnish War, where the ”Gibraltar of the North” endured a gruelling Russian siege for fifteen months and never surrendered. Eventually, in the spring of 1809, the rake-thin, exhausted defenders of the fortress welcomed back the Swedish high seas fleet that landed troops under General von Vegesack that drove away the Russian troops from the surrounding area and lifted the siege.
*
The old man took me around the nearly deserted islands, and it was easy to see that it had been a nexus of military activity for well over two centuries. There were buildings from both the Swedish and Russian eras, and a lot of abandoned military gear around the islands. Various types of artillery guns were rusting away side by side. In the old drydock, what looked like an imperial Russian mine barge sat forlorn, old contact mines still on its deck. Here an old tractor had been abandoned apparently in the middle of hauling an obsolete muzzle-loaded coastal gun off a battlement. Only the accumulated rust of years betrayed the fact that the Russian team of soldiers engaged in the work had left several decades, not one hour ago. And here, we found the remains of an imperial Russian anti-ship missile battery, right next to the sadly neglected grave of Ehrensvärd himself.
Here lies Count Augustin Ehrensvärd, Field Marshal, Knight, and Commander of the Royal Order of the Seraphim, Surrounded by His Accomplishments, the Sveaborg Fortress and the Army Fleet.
Old military areas, restricted and closed to the world for decades, if not centuries, acquire a certain kind of an aura, and rarely have I felt it as strongly as when I left the Count's grave and walked slowly to the seaside battlements looking out to the Gulf of Finland. Apart from me and the old man, there was no soul in sight.
No living soul, at least.
*
The next time the fortress of Sveaborg saw fighting was during the Russo-Swedish War of 1838, the so-called Charles XIV's War, where General Carl von Kraemer, the commandant of the fortress islands, surrendered the until then impregnable fortress to the superior Russian fleet that had just driven off the Swedish Navy with its tail between its legs. When the Russians then took over the entire area of Swedish Finland, the borders of the Russian Empire were pushed to the Åland Islands in the south and the Kalix River in the north. Sweden had received the devastating blow that pushed it into seemingly permanent neutrality – until 1920, that is.
*
What the old man told me was that he was there to rebuild the fortress. His dream was to make it a tourist destination where both Swedish and Russian military history could be displayed and explained to visitors. And what I saw in the islands convinced me about the potential of the fortress for this purpose. There were several decrepid buildings full of abandoned gear. In one of them, old Great War era seaplanes had been left, heaped together and mouldering, in another we saw different submarine parts and depth charges in surprisingly neat rows.
There was potential, sure. But where would the millions of Finnish Republican marks come from to fix and renovate all this to something approximating to a museum site? Not from the cash-strapped, permanently unstable Finnish Republican government, that was sure.
*
And as Finland become a Grand Duchy under the Russian Empire, Sveaborg become a Russian fortress. It had always been a small military town in these islands, and now it expanded also to the mainland as the Russians started to build a defensive fortification system in the Gulf of Finland, spooked by the Swedish attack in 1838 and the initial losses they had suffered due to the surprise achieved by the Swedish. Together with Reval to the south, Sveaborg became a major site for the Russian Baltic fleet. The rocky head of land known as Skatudden to the north was made into a new military port, and eventually it would also house a Russian seaplane base during the Great War. Russian soldier's families started now moving into Sveaborg and the nearby small town of Helsingfors. Here a sizable Russian community formed before the beginning of the 20th century and today it can be considered one of the oldest, most established centres of the Russian minority in Finland. The small town of Helsingfors, of about 35 000 people (2013) has a Swedish-speaking majority but has about 30% Russian speakers among its population. They call their home town Gelsinge. The town also has a small Finnish-speaking minority, and in comparison to most of Finland, they speak a highly curious local patois, a melange of obvious Russian and Swedish influences among their hillbilly Finnish, full of the history of this old military town.
*
As we walked the crumbling corridors below the old, stony defensive works on Wolf Island, the old man told me that he had served in the military once and held a leading position on the island. He did not strike me as Russian, but then also Finns served their Emperor and Grand Duke on this island. During the Great War, almost one third of the fortress garrison was made of Finns, and again the fortress had to fend off an attack, this time from the west as in 1920-22 the joint German-Swedish fleet attempted to bottle the imperial Russian fleet to the Gulf of Finland, and eventually tried to take Finland by a grand amphibious operation using the Ålands as a stepping stone in the summer of 1921. Most of the action concentrated in the Turku area in the southwest, the surroundings of the capital of the Grand Duchy, but again Sveaborg played its part, especially during the so-called Second Battle of Gogland, where the Russian Baltic Fleet's battleships fought a strong German-Swedish squadron and made it leave with a bloody nose. Krepost Sveaborg and the Helsingfors area installations supplied and supported the Russian fleet, and the 12 and 10 inch coastal batteries in the area were liberally used against the attackers who found out that, what with the batteries, the minefields and the new Russian Krokodil Class submarines, the Gulf of Finland was not exactly an easy area to work in.
*
What surprised me most about the fortress islands was the utter peacefulness that prevailed here. The whole day we had the islands to ourselves, and even if I could frequently spy some sailing boats and motor launches out in the sea, they did not approach the islands. As we sat down to have a modest meal of some fish soup in a building my host used, apparently, as a workshop and makeshift kitchen, the old man told me that the locals thought that the island was full of old explosives and bombs, and that they were liable to go off anytime anyone came any closer than 200 meters of it. With a knowing smirk, he told me that it suited him just fine – he liked his solitude, especially in the summer as there were birds to keep him company, as well as a militant-looking yellow cat that followed us for a while during the day.
” - I want people to come to the islands, in droves”, the man told me, ”but only when I am good and ready for it”.
It looked to me that he would never be ready for it, not the way things were right then.
*
In the end, it was the grandson of the man who had surrendered Sveaborg to the Russians, and been considered a traitor because of it in Stockholm and in Swedish historiography, who at the latter part of the Great War saved the Russian Empire. Maybe we could call this a historical irony, though there was nothing strange in the fact that many of the noble military families in Finland, previously loyal to the Swedish crown, in the 19th century then served the Emperor of All the Russias as military professionals. And so as the mounting losses of the Great War drove the Russian workers to radicalize and finally the Communards to stage a coup attempt in the imperial capital, Petrograd, it was the Finnish general Johan von Kraemer that with his two loyal Finnish Guards Divisions marched on the capital and saved the imperial family that had been locked up in the Winter Palace. The words of Alexander IV of Russia to von Kraemer and his top officers on October 17th 1921 are well known.
Let me embrace you, my loyal Finns, for you have saved Russia from sure defeat and doom.
Due to this bold action by the Finnish, Swedish-speaking general, Russia avoided out and out revolution and civil war.
That time.
*
The very pinnacle, the coup de grace as it were, of my visit to the Sveaborg fortress was when the old man smiled to me mysteriously and took me down to what I assumed was an old bunker. With flashlights we entered a cavernous space with a large opening on the sea level, bringing in bright summer light. And there, sitting on rails on a concrete surface, sat a great metal fish.
” - The Kaiman”, the old man said, beaming, ”the very submarine that sunk the German Friedrich der Grosse, with two perfectly aimed torpedoes at the end of the Second Battle of Gogland.”
The old submarine looked corroded, but still quite salvageable for museum use. I just had to ask why it was here.
” - They were about to make it a museum, back in 1972”, he said, brandishing his index finger, ”but then, well, came the Revolution, and you know...”
Indeed. The Revolution and the fall of the Russian Empire.
*
The end of the Great War saved Russia, and the Russian monarchy could sit at the winners' table in Brussels when the war ended. Germany was humiliated, though not as badly as might have been the case, and even Sweden winded up paying reparations to the Russians. After the war, decades of peace and stability in Europe followed. But in Russia, the Romanovs failed to win the peace. Despite the very real threat of revolution during the war, reforms were not undertaken and the empire trudged on seemingly supported only by the good luck of the okhrana and the good popularity of young Emperor Nicholas III. But as the radicalism spread, the global economic downturn of the early 1970s proved the final nail in the coffin of the Russian monarchy. A series of protests in Petrograd and Moscow caused the government to call in the military, and when in the end in January 1973 the military finally refused to follow the orders to open fire against the protestors, the hollowed-out shell of the Russian Empire fell.
There were no loyal Finns to save it this time. To wit, when the Russian People's Republic was proclaimed at the Tauride Palace on June 2nd 1973, Turku was the first to declare independence, followed by the Baltic states and Poland. The Finnish Republic was born, and with that Sveaborg become a Finnish fortress – at last, some would have said.
*
The old man told me that the new Finnish government had wanted nothing to do with the fortified islands. The state had no money anyway, and besides, fixed coastal fortresses were old-fashioned when modern war had became mobile enough to go around and over them in a heartbeat.
And so, after the Russian Navy and rocket forces left Sveaborg in some disarray, the last soldier to step out of the gate just turned off the lights and snapped a padlock to the door. To the Finnish Republic, Sveaborg was just a symbol of foreign rule and oppression, by both the Swedish and the Russians, the old bearded man told me.
” - And so it was up to me to look after it”, he told with a melancholy smile on his face.
I fully understood how he felt like. This much history, just sitting here, abandoned to the ravages of Finnish weather and time. A lot of both, I thought, when we returned to the pier where the ferry was due to come to pick me up in an hour.
I thanked the old man for the tour, and shook his coarse but warm hand. He dipped his head briefly as well, in an old-fashioned nod, to thank me for my rare interest into the islands of Sveaborg, ”the Gibraltar of the North”.
*
It was late afternoon as I stood on the small service ferry, with a fourtysomething man who had brought me to Sveaborg in the morning, exchanging a few words about the town of Gelsinge, like he, a member of the local Russian community, called it. As he told it, the small coastal town was emptying up.
” - The youngsters, they leave for the big towns – Turku, Vyborg, Hämeenlinna”, he told me, and reminded me that many families had also moved to Russia after the 70s, after the Finns had instituted draconian citizenship rules even for people who had lived for decades in the old Grand Duchy.
” - At least the situation is a bit better, now”, he conceded. Not that the now more lenient laws on citizenship would help the fact the Gelsinge, Helsingfors, was a town that was slowly wasting away. It had been the military base in Sveaborg and the surrounding area that had sustained the town, I now understood, and after the base had been closed down, the town had naturally suffered.
Maybe the old man's plans of making the islands a tourist hotspot could help the town, I suggested to the man.
His reaction was downright strange.
” - Please don't lie to me! Nobody lives on the islands, not for several decades”, he told me, almost angrily.
Sure as I was that I had just spent the day with a friendly, ancient man with an exhaustive knowledge about the Sveaborg fortress, I chose not to press the issue with the man who had suddenly assumed a quite cold demeanor towards me.
As I stepped off the ferry on a crumbling concrete pier in the modest Helsingfors passenger harbour, I remembered the words carved on the old, half collapsed King's Gate on the island of Gustav's Sword.
Future world, stand here on your own two feet and don't trust outside help.
Those were the words of Count Augustin Ehrensvärd. As I walked through the quiet streets of central Helsingfors in a beautiful summer evening, to my car parked near the 1950s Imperial Brutalist town hall, I could only wonder.
(filler)
It was a beautiful July morning on the southern coast of the Finnish Republic. I met the old man at the docks after the rickety little ferry had left me in front of a long old building with what looked like peeling imperial era paint on it. The ferry was well on its way back towards the mainland when the man stepped into view from a nearby doorway and raised his hand in a perfunctory salute. With his scruffy beard and mostly bald head, he looked almost like a monk. The feeling was enhanced by his long coat that looked like flowing robes in the fresh summer breeze.
” - You the journalist, eh?”, the man asked as I got closer.
Somehow, he had got word of my arrival beforehand. I had not expected something like that.
*
The island fortress of Sveaborg was originally created by the Swedish realm to bolster the defence of the Finnish southern coast against the advances of the Russians in the mid-18th century. Under the fortifications expert, Augustin Ehrensvärd, the fortress was built into what at the time was a modern coastal defence system on six islands, even though it was never realized to the extent the Swedish officer himself had envisioned it. Here also a military shipyard was created, and under the tutelage of Ehrensvärd and his collaborator, the shipbuilder Fredrik Henrik af Chapman, the Swedish would build a big part of a new kind of an archipelago fleet of small sailing ships and galleys that were specifically designed to defend the broken, shallow waters of the Finnish coast in the face of the threat presented by the growing Russian fleet.
The Sveaborg sea fortress would see its moment of glory during the Russo-Swedish war of 1807-1810, the so-called Finnish War, where the ”Gibraltar of the North” endured a gruelling Russian siege for fifteen months and never surrendered. Eventually, in the spring of 1809, the rake-thin, exhausted defenders of the fortress welcomed back the Swedish high seas fleet that landed troops under General von Vegesack that drove away the Russian troops from the surrounding area and lifted the siege.
*
The old man took me around the nearly deserted islands, and it was easy to see that it had been a nexus of military activity for well over two centuries. There were buildings from both the Swedish and Russian eras, and a lot of abandoned military gear around the islands. Various types of artillery guns were rusting away side by side. In the old drydock, what looked like an imperial Russian mine barge sat forlorn, old contact mines still on its deck. Here an old tractor had been abandoned apparently in the middle of hauling an obsolete muzzle-loaded coastal gun off a battlement. Only the accumulated rust of years betrayed the fact that the Russian team of soldiers engaged in the work had left several decades, not one hour ago. And here, we found the remains of an imperial Russian anti-ship missile battery, right next to the sadly neglected grave of Ehrensvärd himself.
Here lies Count Augustin Ehrensvärd, Field Marshal, Knight, and Commander of the Royal Order of the Seraphim, Surrounded by His Accomplishments, the Sveaborg Fortress and the Army Fleet.
Old military areas, restricted and closed to the world for decades, if not centuries, acquire a certain kind of an aura, and rarely have I felt it as strongly as when I left the Count's grave and walked slowly to the seaside battlements looking out to the Gulf of Finland. Apart from me and the old man, there was no soul in sight.
No living soul, at least.
*
The next time the fortress of Sveaborg saw fighting was during the Russo-Swedish War of 1838, the so-called Charles XIV's War, where General Carl von Kraemer, the commandant of the fortress islands, surrendered the until then impregnable fortress to the superior Russian fleet that had just driven off the Swedish Navy with its tail between its legs. When the Russians then took over the entire area of Swedish Finland, the borders of the Russian Empire were pushed to the Åland Islands in the south and the Kalix River in the north. Sweden had received the devastating blow that pushed it into seemingly permanent neutrality – until 1920, that is.
*
What the old man told me was that he was there to rebuild the fortress. His dream was to make it a tourist destination where both Swedish and Russian military history could be displayed and explained to visitors. And what I saw in the islands convinced me about the potential of the fortress for this purpose. There were several decrepid buildings full of abandoned gear. In one of them, old Great War era seaplanes had been left, heaped together and mouldering, in another we saw different submarine parts and depth charges in surprisingly neat rows.
There was potential, sure. But where would the millions of Finnish Republican marks come from to fix and renovate all this to something approximating to a museum site? Not from the cash-strapped, permanently unstable Finnish Republican government, that was sure.
*
And as Finland become a Grand Duchy under the Russian Empire, Sveaborg become a Russian fortress. It had always been a small military town in these islands, and now it expanded also to the mainland as the Russians started to build a defensive fortification system in the Gulf of Finland, spooked by the Swedish attack in 1838 and the initial losses they had suffered due to the surprise achieved by the Swedish. Together with Reval to the south, Sveaborg became a major site for the Russian Baltic fleet. The rocky head of land known as Skatudden to the north was made into a new military port, and eventually it would also house a Russian seaplane base during the Great War. Russian soldier's families started now moving into Sveaborg and the nearby small town of Helsingfors. Here a sizable Russian community formed before the beginning of the 20th century and today it can be considered one of the oldest, most established centres of the Russian minority in Finland. The small town of Helsingfors, of about 35 000 people (2013) has a Swedish-speaking majority but has about 30% Russian speakers among its population. They call their home town Gelsinge. The town also has a small Finnish-speaking minority, and in comparison to most of Finland, they speak a highly curious local patois, a melange of obvious Russian and Swedish influences among their hillbilly Finnish, full of the history of this old military town.
*
As we walked the crumbling corridors below the old, stony defensive works on Wolf Island, the old man told me that he had served in the military once and held a leading position on the island. He did not strike me as Russian, but then also Finns served their Emperor and Grand Duke on this island. During the Great War, almost one third of the fortress garrison was made of Finns, and again the fortress had to fend off an attack, this time from the west as in 1920-22 the joint German-Swedish fleet attempted to bottle the imperial Russian fleet to the Gulf of Finland, and eventually tried to take Finland by a grand amphibious operation using the Ålands as a stepping stone in the summer of 1921. Most of the action concentrated in the Turku area in the southwest, the surroundings of the capital of the Grand Duchy, but again Sveaborg played its part, especially during the so-called Second Battle of Gogland, where the Russian Baltic Fleet's battleships fought a strong German-Swedish squadron and made it leave with a bloody nose. Krepost Sveaborg and the Helsingfors area installations supplied and supported the Russian fleet, and the 12 and 10 inch coastal batteries in the area were liberally used against the attackers who found out that, what with the batteries, the minefields and the new Russian Krokodil Class submarines, the Gulf of Finland was not exactly an easy area to work in.
*
What surprised me most about the fortress islands was the utter peacefulness that prevailed here. The whole day we had the islands to ourselves, and even if I could frequently spy some sailing boats and motor launches out in the sea, they did not approach the islands. As we sat down to have a modest meal of some fish soup in a building my host used, apparently, as a workshop and makeshift kitchen, the old man told me that the locals thought that the island was full of old explosives and bombs, and that they were liable to go off anytime anyone came any closer than 200 meters of it. With a knowing smirk, he told me that it suited him just fine – he liked his solitude, especially in the summer as there were birds to keep him company, as well as a militant-looking yellow cat that followed us for a while during the day.
” - I want people to come to the islands, in droves”, the man told me, ”but only when I am good and ready for it”.
It looked to me that he would never be ready for it, not the way things were right then.
*
In the end, it was the grandson of the man who had surrendered Sveaborg to the Russians, and been considered a traitor because of it in Stockholm and in Swedish historiography, who at the latter part of the Great War saved the Russian Empire. Maybe we could call this a historical irony, though there was nothing strange in the fact that many of the noble military families in Finland, previously loyal to the Swedish crown, in the 19th century then served the Emperor of All the Russias as military professionals. And so as the mounting losses of the Great War drove the Russian workers to radicalize and finally the Communards to stage a coup attempt in the imperial capital, Petrograd, it was the Finnish general Johan von Kraemer that with his two loyal Finnish Guards Divisions marched on the capital and saved the imperial family that had been locked up in the Winter Palace. The words of Alexander IV of Russia to von Kraemer and his top officers on October 17th 1921 are well known.
Let me embrace you, my loyal Finns, for you have saved Russia from sure defeat and doom.
Due to this bold action by the Finnish, Swedish-speaking general, Russia avoided out and out revolution and civil war.
That time.
*
The very pinnacle, the coup de grace as it were, of my visit to the Sveaborg fortress was when the old man smiled to me mysteriously and took me down to what I assumed was an old bunker. With flashlights we entered a cavernous space with a large opening on the sea level, bringing in bright summer light. And there, sitting on rails on a concrete surface, sat a great metal fish.
” - The Kaiman”, the old man said, beaming, ”the very submarine that sunk the German Friedrich der Grosse, with two perfectly aimed torpedoes at the end of the Second Battle of Gogland.”
The old submarine looked corroded, but still quite salvageable for museum use. I just had to ask why it was here.
” - They were about to make it a museum, back in 1972”, he said, brandishing his index finger, ”but then, well, came the Revolution, and you know...”
Indeed. The Revolution and the fall of the Russian Empire.
*
The end of the Great War saved Russia, and the Russian monarchy could sit at the winners' table in Brussels when the war ended. Germany was humiliated, though not as badly as might have been the case, and even Sweden winded up paying reparations to the Russians. After the war, decades of peace and stability in Europe followed. But in Russia, the Romanovs failed to win the peace. Despite the very real threat of revolution during the war, reforms were not undertaken and the empire trudged on seemingly supported only by the good luck of the okhrana and the good popularity of young Emperor Nicholas III. But as the radicalism spread, the global economic downturn of the early 1970s proved the final nail in the coffin of the Russian monarchy. A series of protests in Petrograd and Moscow caused the government to call in the military, and when in the end in January 1973 the military finally refused to follow the orders to open fire against the protestors, the hollowed-out shell of the Russian Empire fell.
There were no loyal Finns to save it this time. To wit, when the Russian People's Republic was proclaimed at the Tauride Palace on June 2nd 1973, Turku was the first to declare independence, followed by the Baltic states and Poland. The Finnish Republic was born, and with that Sveaborg become a Finnish fortress – at last, some would have said.
*
The old man told me that the new Finnish government had wanted nothing to do with the fortified islands. The state had no money anyway, and besides, fixed coastal fortresses were old-fashioned when modern war had became mobile enough to go around and over them in a heartbeat.
And so, after the Russian Navy and rocket forces left Sveaborg in some disarray, the last soldier to step out of the gate just turned off the lights and snapped a padlock to the door. To the Finnish Republic, Sveaborg was just a symbol of foreign rule and oppression, by both the Swedish and the Russians, the old bearded man told me.
” - And so it was up to me to look after it”, he told with a melancholy smile on his face.
I fully understood how he felt like. This much history, just sitting here, abandoned to the ravages of Finnish weather and time. A lot of both, I thought, when we returned to the pier where the ferry was due to come to pick me up in an hour.
I thanked the old man for the tour, and shook his coarse but warm hand. He dipped his head briefly as well, in an old-fashioned nod, to thank me for my rare interest into the islands of Sveaborg, ”the Gibraltar of the North”.
*
It was late afternoon as I stood on the small service ferry, with a fourtysomething man who had brought me to Sveaborg in the morning, exchanging a few words about the town of Gelsinge, like he, a member of the local Russian community, called it. As he told it, the small coastal town was emptying up.
” - The youngsters, they leave for the big towns – Turku, Vyborg, Hämeenlinna”, he told me, and reminded me that many families had also moved to Russia after the 70s, after the Finns had instituted draconian citizenship rules even for people who had lived for decades in the old Grand Duchy.
” - At least the situation is a bit better, now”, he conceded. Not that the now more lenient laws on citizenship would help the fact the Gelsinge, Helsingfors, was a town that was slowly wasting away. It had been the military base in Sveaborg and the surrounding area that had sustained the town, I now understood, and after the base had been closed down, the town had naturally suffered.
Maybe the old man's plans of making the islands a tourist hotspot could help the town, I suggested to the man.
His reaction was downright strange.
” - Please don't lie to me! Nobody lives on the islands, not for several decades”, he told me, almost angrily.
Sure as I was that I had just spent the day with a friendly, ancient man with an exhaustive knowledge about the Sveaborg fortress, I chose not to press the issue with the man who had suddenly assumed a quite cold demeanor towards me.
As I stepped off the ferry on a crumbling concrete pier in the modest Helsingfors passenger harbour, I remembered the words carved on the old, half collapsed King's Gate on the island of Gustav's Sword.
Future world, stand here on your own two feet and don't trust outside help.
Those were the words of Count Augustin Ehrensvärd. As I walked through the quiet streets of central Helsingfors in a beautiful summer evening, to my car parked near the 1950s Imperial Brutalist town hall, I could only wonder.
(filler)
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