SUMMARY:

The article discusses the predicament of the Swedish-speaking political elite of the Grand Duchy of Finland in the 1830s–1840s. Consisting mainly of Swedish aristocrats with close family connections and cultural ties with the Kingdom of Sweden, they pursued the two-prong task of substantiating Finland’s autonomy within the Russian Empire by appealing to the ancient Swedish legal and political tradition while at the same time distancing themselves and the Grand Duchy from modern Sweden. Appalled by what they perceived as the revolutionary and democratizing Swedish society of the time and sympathetic toward the old-regime aristocratic Swedish political culture of the eighteenth century, Finland’s elite were quite content with the order of things in the Russian Empire under Nicholas I as long as the Grand Duchy enjoyed its old privileges. Their counterparts in St. Petersburg, most immediately the nominal governor-general of Finland, prince Alexander Menshikov, were only too happy to sustain this arrangement. Menshikov, who was also the naval minister and a close associate of Nicholas I, resisted any projects aimed at the empire’s modernization if these envisioned the elimination of special arrangements for regions, such as Finland, and the streamlining of the administrative system. Close solidarity between Russia’s imperial elites and Swedish elites in Finland contrasted with the latter’s disapproval of modern Sweden and attempts to severe ties with the former metropole.
In the article the concept of “translation” frames this complex political and cultural dynamic. Broadly understood as the conversion of one linguistic, cultural, and legal reality into familiar categories of some other local sociopolitical context, translation was central to the empire’s very existence. It helped achieve the coherence needed for administering diverse local communities. Translation, a reciprocal process by definition, also allowed these communities to formulate their grievances and interests and communicate them to the imperial center. As long as a translation was needed, the region enjoyed a degree of autonomy and some leverage in dealings with the imperial authorities. Until later in the nineteenth century, otherness was a prerequisite for autonomy. Finland’s political elite used its otherness in a complex translation process: interpreting old Swedishness as the essence of new Finlandness and selling it to St. Petersburg by juxtaposing this construct to modern Sweden.