Ein Staat, kein Gouvernement: Die Entstehung und Entwicklung der Autonomie Finnlands im russischen Zarenreich, 1808 bis 1826 [A State but not a Province: The Origin and Evolution of Finland's Autonomy in the Russian Empire, 1808–26] (review)

The somewhat laconic main title of this Heidelberg dissertation is taken from a memorandum, written at the beginning of 1811 by Mikhail Mikhailovich Speranskii—Finliandiia est´ gosudarstvo a ne guberniia (an ambiguous phrase, which provoked much controversy later, but which may be translated as "Finland is a state [or a principality] and not a province"). This summation was intended to strengthen the case for a reorganization of the way in which Finnish affairs were handled. As Speranskii went on to say in his submission to the tsar, the administration of the recently acquired Finnish territory was being handled alongside a host of other matters by an inadequately staffed office. His proposal for a separate four-man commission, headed by a state secretary, to act as a kind of overseer and watchdog for the tsar over the administrative affairs of Finland, led to the creation of the Committee for Finnish Affairs later in the year. That committee was eventually wound up in 1826, but not before its Finnish members had made an unsuccessful attempt to define more precisely Finland's constitutional position. It was the uncertainties attendant upon this matter that in a sense provided the creative tension that gave life and substance to Finnish autonomy, not only during the period in question but until the very end of the relationship in 1917. This book is, in fact, concerned far more with the constitutional issue than with the development of Finnish autonomy in an administrative sense—a subject that has recently been covered comprehensively in the publications of the Committee for Administrative History (Hallintohistoriakomitea). It owes much to recent Finnish scholarship, in particular the work of Osmo Jussila, whose 1969 dissertation, "Suomen perustuslait venäläisten ja suomalaisten tulkintojen mukaan 1808–1863" (Finnish Fundamental Laws as Interpreted by the Russians and the Finns, 1808–1863), was truly a groundbreaking endeavor. Indeed, on almost every major point, the author finds himself in agreement with Jussila. Both, for example, believe that Speranskii was interested more in administrative efficiency than in the niceties of constitutional theory, and both see similarities between the ways in which privileges in the Baltic provinces and in Finland were treated. The definition offered by members of the Committee for Finnish Affairs in 1819 that Finland was united to Russia and was a part of the empire in relation to other states, but that in its internal administration it had a separate political existence, is seen by both writers as the first clear statement of a position that was to become axiomatic in Finnish political circles in subsequent decades.

Nesemann's book is thus largely a careful retreading of a path opened up by Jussila and Keijo Korhonen, the author of the definitive study of the Committee for Finnish Affairs.¹ He touches on other imperial experiments in constitutionalism, most notably in Poland, but does not go into any comparative analysis, and he says remarkably little about Alexander I's own ideas, certainly in comparison with the officials who served him, whose thoughts and actions are quite thoroughly examined. Although the author considers the inheritance of Old Finland—the territories ceded to Russia in 1721 and 1743—he devotes rather more space to the specific problem of the land donations than to asking how the experience of dealing with detached slivers of another kingdom might or might not have influenced Russian thinking about how to deal with a much greater chunk of the Swedish realm in and after 1809. He suggests that the Baltic German dominance of the administration of Old Finland created a kind of model for how the Russian state should deal with...