Helsinki of the czars

by George C. Schoolfield

Helsinki, in Swedish Helsingfors, underwent radical changes during the somewhat more than a century when it was the capital of Russia's semi-autonomous Grand Duchy of Finland, initially much favored by the Czars, then, as Pan-Slavism was fostered by Alexander III and Nicholas II, regarded as a hotbed of anti-Russian sentiments. From a merchantile and shipping town, the site of the harbor fortress-complex of Sveaborg, Sweden's "Gibraltar of the North," Helsinki suddenly became the seat of government and the university; the generosity of Alexander I and Nicholas I, the refined taste of the city-planner Johan Albrecht Ehrenstrom (a sometime protege of Sweden's Gustav III), and the genius of an architect from Berlin, Carl Ludvig Engel, made it into a Neo-Classical showplace. But by the 1860s, its Swedish-speaking society and cultural institutions were confronted by zealots of "Finnishness" (and a swiftly growing Finnish population) that demanded their rightful place in the sun. George C. S