The return of Vyborg governorate to the "inner" Russia: the legal dimension of the search for national borders

Tarabara Dmitry Olegovich Postgraduate, Department of Theory and History of Law, Saint-Petersburg State University 199034, Russia, Saint Petersburg, Saint Petersburg, Universitetskaya Embankment str., 7/9 tarabara@list.ru Other publications by this author

Introduction. The projects of joining first a part and then the entire territory of the Vyborg province of the Grand Duchy of Finland to the St. Petersburg province bordering it are somewhat neglected by researchers in comparison with other measures of the Finnish policy of P. A. Stolypin and his successors, for example, the adoption of the law on June 17, 1910 on national legislation or the preparation of the "big program of Russification" by the commission of Senator N. N. Korevo. Despite the fact that the regulations on the above-mentioned administrative-territorial transformations have not been submitted to the Government and Parliament for consideration, their content and development history are of considerable research value. Being an organic part of broader contexts, they reflect both the general evolution of the national policy of the Russian state in the early twentieth century, from claims to acculturation of the entire non-Russian population (at least in some marginal regions) to defining the boundaries of the "Russian national territory" within the imperial space ^{[13, pp. 217-240]}, and certain endogenous problems of political modernization of the country.

The history of Vyborg province. The government's discourse on this reform cannot be understood without referring to the history of the lands that have become the focus of attention of the Russian government. Vyborg province was formed in 1744 on the territories of the Karelian Isthmus and the Northern Ladoga Region, annexed to the Russian Empire as a result of the Northern War of 1700-1721 and the Russo-Swedish War of 1741-1743. The new lands have retained a fairly broad legal, political and cultural autonomy. By the end of the 18th century, 99.8% of the local population were Finns and Swedes ^{[6, p. 228]}; the Russian element in the region was represented almost exclusively by the military, officials and owners of granted lands. The only attempt at administrative and judicial integration of this region with the "core" of the Empire was made only at the end of the reign of Catherine II with the extension of the all-Russian provincial reform to it, but already in 1796, Paul I, who ascended the throne, restored the previous order of government ^{[1, 401-402]}.

Shortly after the annexation of all Finnish lands to the Russian Empire as a result of the Russo-Swedish War of 1808-1809, a proposal arose in government circles to unite the "Old" and "New" Finlands, eventually supported by Emperor Alexander I. December 11, 1811 By the Supreme Manifesto, the Vyborg province (called Finland at that time) was transferred to the Grand Duchy of Finland. Attempts to partially revise this decision in 1822-1823 and 1826 were unsuccessful ^{[4, l. 180-184]}. Over the next decades, Vyborg province was considered as a legitimate, integral part of the territory of Finland by the Russian government, the Finnish authorities, and, subsequently, the Finnish national movement.

It is important to note that in the Grand Duchy of Finland, unlike the Western or Baltic provinces, the different ethnic origins of the aristocracy and the majority of the population did not lead to the formation of alternative national projects – both the predominantly Swedish-speaking nobility and the majority of Finnish-speaking peasants were involved in a unified national movement ^{[20, p. 122]}. However, this did not mean reaching a political consensus, for example, on issues of language and culture, as evidenced by the very fact of the existence of the Sherman (Svekoman) socio-political movement. Nevertheless, it seems more correct to consider the latter not as an alternative, but rather as an offshoot within the framework of a single national discourse – it operated exclusively within the framework of the Finnish political project and remained loyal to it, and not to Sweden. Moreover, the Sherman occupied more radical positions regarding relations with the imperial authorities than their political opponents (the Fennomans) ^{[10, pp. 30-31]}. There are various points of view in the historical literature on the extent to which the Finnish population was embraced by national consciousness by the beginning of the twentieth century, however, the mass and dynamism of the Finnish national movement, especially in comparison with the majority of ethnic groups of the Russian Empire, are in themselves beyond doubt ^{[7, p. 163]}; ^{[13, p. 185]}.

The official position of the Russian government regarding the expediency of transferring Vyborg province to the Grand Duchy of Finland and maintaining the status quo changed to the exact opposite after the revolutionary events of 1905-1907, not least after a direct clash with national mobilization and political radicalism in the region. The idea of revising the administrative boundaries of the strategically important territory of the principality in the interests of the empire fit seamlessly into the political course of the new Chairman of the Council of Ministers, P. A. Stolypin, which envisioned a consistent, systematic restriction of Finland's autonomy by stricter legal frameworks, the expansion of central government control over the region and the fight against "Finnish separatism." The latter meant the doctrine of Finland as a separate state from Russia, which spread first among Finnish intellectuals (which is important, among the leaders of both the Sherman and Fennom movements), and by the beginning of the twentieth century among the general population ^{[19, pp. 57-59, 95-96]}.

Discourse and politics. On November 13, 1910, a meeting of the Special Conference on the Affairs of the Grand Duchy of Finland was held, dedicated to the status of Vyborg province. The journal compiled based on its results describes in great detail the government discourse on Russia's territorial claims. Several dozen of its pages contain a detailed system of legitimizing arguments, including the fight against Finnish separatism, opposition to the pan-Finnish national movement, the need to eliminate the revolutionary underground, the restoration of historical justice, and ensuring state interests in the defense of St. Petersburg. Russian Russian Orthodox Shrines were returned to the indigenous Russian provinces: the Valaam and Konevetsky monasteries, "the native Russian heritage that turned out to be part of the Finnish possessions after the separation of Vyborg Province," for example, the protection of the interests of residents of the Great Russian villages of Raivolo and Krasnoe (Kyurule).^{[4, L. 185-192]}.

In the end, the Special Meeting naturally recognized the "return of Vyborg province to the Imperial Lands" as a desirable and indisputable measure from a state-legal point of view, however, due to the scale of the plan and the improbability of its operational implementation, it was decided to limit the development of a project to include the Kivinebsky and Novokirk parishes (communities) geographically closest to it into the St. Petersburg province Vyborg province ^{[4, l. 197-198]}. The development of the law was entrusted to a special interdepartmental commission chaired by Comrade Minister of the Interior and then Secretary of State S. E. Kryzhanovsky. It should be noted that in connection with the allocation of the village of Terijoki (Zelenogorsk) to an independent administrative unit in 1911, the final version of the bill already referred to three parishes.

By this time, the Russian government had already had the experience of a "symbolic" confrontation with alternative national projects for territories with an institutional structure fundamentally different from its internal provinces. Particularly significant in this regard is the confrontation with the Romanian state over the southern part of Bessarabia transferred to it for the period 1856-1878, from which, upon the return of these territories to Russia, Izmailsky Uyezd was formed, and with the Polish national movement within the Empire itself for the territories of Kholm Rus. Despite the external similarity of the imperial discourse in each of the three cases, the subsequent state policy towards Izmailsky district of Bessarabia province, Kholm province and Vyborg province differed significantly.

Thus, Izmailsky uyezd maintained a pronounced administrative and legal isolation until 1917. Unlike the rest of the Bessarabian province, a full-fledged world justice and a wordless communal self-government functioned here, but there was no zemstvo, no city government, no noble institutions, no volost and rural administrations, no zemstvo chiefs ^{[18, pp. 252-253]}. At the beginning of the twentieth century, several attempts were made to unify local institutions of government and self-government with the rest of the Empire, but none of them was implemented. The preservation of the status quo was apparently due to considerations of administrative expediency and lack of incentives for change due to the relative weakness of the national movement in Bessarabia.

Kholm province, formed from the districts of the Lublin and Sedlec provinces of the Kingdom of Poland with a predominant Orthodox and (or) Russian-speaking population, on the contrary, became the arena of cultural confrontation between three competing national projects: Russian, Polish and Ukrainian ^{[2, pp. 110-111]}. One of the key tasks of the government in the region was to form a Russian national identity among the inhabitants of the region, which required not only the homogenization of legislation and the management system, but also the implementation of an active educational, cultural and confessional policy.

In the case of Vyborg Province, the government openly acknowledged the existence of a well-established Finnish identity among the local population and, apparently, had no illusions about its ability to influence its change. As a result, the bill had a very moderate goal of administrative and legal unification of the annexed territories with the "core" of the Empire. The tasks of linguistic, cultural and (or) religious assimilation were not set in principle.

The chosen approach can be considered as a private manifestation of the new course of national policy pursued by P. A. Stolypin and his comrade S. E. Kryzhanovsky, who assumed the rejection of active, purposeful assimilation of the population of certain outskirts of the empire ^{[11, pp. 122-124]}. Perhaps, as in the case of the Kholm province, the real intention of the government, not publicly advertised, was to establish a new, "intra–national" border with the Grand Duchy - the separation of Vyborg province in itself meant an indirect rejection of a similar policy towards the rest of Finland. Unlike Kholm region, there were no ethnic or confessional grounds for nationalist "appropriation of territory" in this case (only 8% of the population of Vyborg province was Orthodox and only 1.2% were Russian–speaking ^{[17, p. 39]}), however, the discourse of restoring historical justice and considerations of state expediency could be quite sufficient.

On the other hand, it should be borne in mind that the subject of the draft law was not the entire Vyborg province, but only a small part of it with a total area of 1.5 thousand km2, the indigenous population of which was about 35 thousand people (about 10 thousand fewer than Russian summer residents permanently and temporarily residing here) ^{[15, pp. 16-17]}. In addition, the drafters of the bill were aware of the migration of local residents to neighboring counties against the background of news about joining the St. Petersburg province. It is possible that the Commission considered acculturation or replacement of the local population only a matter of time, not requiring special intervention.

Alternative modernization projects. No matter what considerations the authors of the bill were guided by, in any case they had to solve a very difficult and non-trivial task. Firstly, by the beginning of the twentieth century, the Finnish social system was fundamentally different from the internal provinces of Russia due to the long existence of broad political autonomy here. Secondly, despite the fact that the Grand Duchy was still a predominantly agrarian, economically underdeveloped region, and its legislation retained many medieval relics, the modernization of individual political institutions advanced further here than in other regions of the Empire, including the metropolitan St. Petersburg province.

At the time of the events under consideration, almost universal literacy had already been achieved in Finland – at the beginning of the twentieth century, 98.8% of the local population over the age of 10 could read, and 40.7% could read and write ^{[17, pp. 50-51]}. Despite all the problems of the Finnish agricultural sector, local peasants did not know such archaic institutions as the village community and the volost court. In towns and villages, there were elected self-government bodies with broad autonomy from the local administration. The transformation of the Finnish Sejm into a modern-type parliament, formed on the basis of universal, direct and equal suffrage, completed the process of leveling class privileges and restrictions ^{[8, p. 368]}; ^{[9, p. 301-302, 614-617]}. The rest of Russia was developing in a similar, but not identical, direction. The gradual equalization of the rights of all classes, the development of mass primary education, the stimulation of private land ownership, the formation of a parliamentary culture, reforms of local government, self–government and the court - all these are relevant elements of the political agenda of the early twentieth century for all European regions of the Empire.

In this sense, the parishes of Vyborg province have become a point of contact between two alternative approaches to the modernization of state institutions. Unfortunately, the draft law under consideration provides very limited material that could be considered as an attempt to coordinate and co-adapt them, but even it is quite sufficient to demonstrate the reform potential of the Russian government and the internal logic of its transformative activities. The most significant in this regard is the regulation of the legal status of residents of the annexed territories, the organization of local self-government and civil legislation.

The legal status of the local population. First of all, attention is drawn to a rather unprecedented measure related to the projected restoration of class differentiation in a society where it was leveled. It is significant that the members of the Commission, including its chairman, were aware of the absence of class rights and distinctions in Finland (at least in the legal plane), despite the preservation of noble titles ^{[16, l. 5]}.

The bill equated the population of the annexed parishes (with the exception of nobles and representatives of the clergy) to persons of rural status. This norm convincingly demonstrates that despite the formation of an increasing number of state institutions on a wordless or all-religious basis and the gradual movement towards civil equality, the importance of the estate system (even if more symbolic than legal) in the eyes of the highest Russian bureaucracy remained high enough to abandon it even on a relatively small area and the population of the territory.

Another provision of the draft law related to determining the legal status of local residents had an ambiguous sound in the field of symbolic meaning – the deprivation of their Finnish citizenship and the granting of all rights and duties to Russian citizens. The quite natural intention of the Commission members to strengthen the legal connection of the population of the annexed parishes with Russia, as well as to confirm the extension of new duties to them, resulted in an additional emphasis on the disparity of the two nationalities and, as a result, the special legal status of the Grand Duchy of Finland and its population. Moreover, this measure in a certain sense disavowed the law on equal rights of Russian subjects and Finnish citizens, adopted on January 20, 1912.

Reform of communal self-government. If the estate issue turned out to be a clear indicator of the boundary between acceptable and unacceptable social transformations, then the norms of the project on local self-government rather reflect an attempt to coordinate two reformist projects on terms acceptable to the Russian government. Communal self-government became the only Finnish public law institution, which it was decided to preserve in the annexed territories, even taking into account the extension of local county and provincial zemstvos to the latter. This fact in itself confirms, if not the interest of the highest bureaucracy in the volost reform, then at least the agreement in principle with the need for its implementation.

An analysis of the provisions of the draft law shows that its authors were guided primarily by the norms of the draft regulations on volost administration (and in the government, not in the Duma edition), and in terms of administrative supervision of local government – by the stricter regulations of the Zemstvo Regulations of 1890 and the City Regulations of 1892. The latter may be associated as not unreasonable concerns about the loyalty of Finnish municipal officials, as well as the general "distortion" of the government's course in 1911-1914.

All categories of persons who did not have voting rights in zemstvo elections (including Jews), as well as those convicted of evading military service, were deprived of the right to participate in community affairs. The restrictions partially affected women as well – according to the draft, they could participate in the work of community meetings only through their representatives ^{[15, p. 81]}.

Community assemblies, like county zemstvos, lost the right to issue binding regulations on improving sanitation, ensuring morality, public order and security. The rest of their decisions, although they did not require approval by the administrative authority, were necessarily provided to the zemstvo chief and, if the latter did not stop their execution, entered into force only two weeks after that ^{[15, pp. 77, 88]}.

This was far from the only manifestation of the tightening of administrative supervision over the activities of communal self-government. Thus, the chairmen and vice-chairmen of community assemblies and community boards, as well as members of community boards, had to be confirmed in office not even by the zemstvo chief, but directly by the governor (Finnish legislation did not provide for such a procedure in principle), and in the event of a two-fold rejection of the submitted candidates, the latter had the right to replace them with his own authority. In addition, the governor was given the right to express disagreement when appointing all other persons of communal self-government, as well as persons invited by communities for free employment for individual occupations ^{[15, pp. 84-86]}.

Opinions were divided on the subject of supervision: some members of the Commission, referring to the draft law on volost zemstvo, proposed limiting it only to the legality of actions and decisions of community institutions, while the majority, appealing from a protective position to the norms of Zemstvo and City Regulations, proposed extending it to the expediency of such ^{[15, p. 86]}.

Thus, although the provisions of the draft law were a significant step forward in comparison with peasant volost self-government in the inner provinces of Russia, they can only be described as reactionary in relation to the Finnish law on rural communal government. It is interesting to note that in the same years, the Finnish Seimas unsuccessfully sought to transform urban and rural communal self-government on the basis of universal, direct, equal suffrage by secret ballot.

Civil law integration. A relatively small part of the draft law is devoted to civil law issues, but they have become the subject of the most serious disagreements. The majority of the commission members called for the immediate introduction of Russian civil substantive and procedural law in the region, while representatives of the Ministries of Justice and Finance took a more cautious position. Rightly pointing out the lack of political need for an immediate breakdown of private law relations, the shortcomings of the Code of Civil Laws even in comparison with Finnish legislation, and the application in many regions of the Empire, including the Kholm province, of local sources of civil law (from the Napoleonic Code to Sharia), representatives of the departments suggested postponing civil law integration until the adoption of a new Civil Code ^{[16, l. 14-17]}.

Thus, none of the members of the Commission was a principled opponent of the extension of Russian civil legislation to the annexed territories – the discussion revolved around the choice of the most acceptable form of implementation of this measure. The protracted discussions did not lead to a consensus – the final decision on this issue was left to the Council of Ministers.

The presented discussion reflects a characteristic feature of the legislative process in Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century – the complexity of internal relationships and the natural interdependence of a large number of simultaneously developed reforms. In rare cases, individual projects, even before becoming legally binding, could stimulate relevant departments to immediately legislate in related areas, but much more often the exact opposite situation was observed – delay in the development, consideration and correction of some bills became a significant, and sometimes insurmountable obstacle to the adoption of others. This was especially evident in situations where the blocked project turned out to be obviously out of scale to the blocker, as was the case in this case.

National policy. Finally, we should focus on the projected regulation of the national issue. The annexation of new territories should indeed have been accompanied by a strengthening of the position of the Russian language in comparison with Finnish, but the latter was considered not as an end in itself, but as an integral component of administrative unification. Thus, the most significant change – the translation of the office management of community administrations into Russian – became almost inevitable in the context of the close cooperation of local governments with the Russian county and provincial administrations, which was mentioned earlier. At the same time, the population of the annexed territories retained the right to "submit papers in Finnish to the community administrations and demand a free translation into Finnish from the papers addressed to them" within five years from the date of entry into force of the law ^{[15, p. 2]}.

In fact, the direct prescriptions of the draft law regarding language, cultural or educational policy were limited to this. There are no provisions in its text related to the Russification of the education system (although some members of the Commission recognized the desirable early closure of Finnish schools), the restriction of Finns' land rights (on the contrary, the preservation of all property rights of the local population was secured) or the encouragement of resettlement to the region of the Russian element. However, it cannot be unequivocally denied that each of the listed consequences (especially the last one) could become a reality due to the very fact of the annexation of the territories of Vyborg province to St. Petersburg.

Expansion of claims. Contrary to the policy of expeditious reform, the draft law took more than three years to develop, due to the prolonged collection of information about the affiliated parishes, the general inertia of the bureaucratic machine, and the internal disagreements of the Commission. The draft was submitted to the Special Conference on the Affairs of the Grand Duchy of Finland only in April 1914.

By this time, the government's discourse regarding claims to Vyborg province had not only not lost its relevance, but had also been supplemented with new arguments – an urgent revision of the border was required by the next, larger-scale measures of the Ministry of War to ensure the defense capability of the northwestern borders of the state and its capital, as well as the need to counteract the "oppression" of the Karelian people, "the only one devoted to it (Russia. – D. T.) in Finland of the element" ^{[5, l. 10-12]}. Of course, in the latter case, it was a question of assimilation of the Karelians on the basis of "historically related principles of Russian nationality and culture" ^{[5, l. 12]}; the Finnish population was still not considered as an object of Russification.

This time, the Special Conference was not going to limit itself to half-hearted measures and insisted on the return of the entire Vyborg province to the Empire within the borders of 1811. Thus, a claim was also made to a part of the neighboring St. Michael's province with the city of Neishlot (Savonlinna) ^{[5, l. 10-11]}. The Council of Ministers, and then Nicholas II, supported this decision. In the new conditions, the 1910 project has lost all relevance.

The general content of the new law on the annexation of the entire Vyborg province was presented to S. E. Kryzhanovsky as follows: "all the foundations of civil life and the social system – in particular, the civil laws and communal administration in force in Finland, as well as the taxation system – would be possible to preserve for the time being in the existing situation and limit themselves to just the transformation of administrative, police and judicial parts" ^{[5, l. 9]}. In essence, it was proposed to act by analogy with the Kholm region – to change the status of the territory and its subsequent homogenization with the inner provinces of Russia in several stages, settling primarily only the most general issues ^{[3, l. 5]}. The choice of this approach is quite natural, because it was S. E. Kryzhanovsky who was the ideological inspirer and direct author of the project for the allocation of the Kholm province. Given that he also became the chairman of the new interdepartmental commission, it seems that the bill would have been drafted in this way.

In general, some historians believe that if it had not been for the First World War, the Vyborg province would undoubtedly sooner or later have been annexed to Russia ^{[12, p. 210]}. It is noteworthy that most of its territory, including the provincial center, will indeed be annexed to the USSR a quarter of a century after the events discussed, but under completely different historical circumstances and at a much higher price.

Conclusion. Thus, despite the lack of practical demand, the draft law on the incorporation of the Kivinebsky, Novokirk and Teriok communities of Vyborg province into the St. Petersburg province represents a unique attempt to harmonize two different institutional systems on terms acceptable to the Russian government in the framework of confrontation with a competing national project. The contrast generated by their contact made it possible to clearly capture the individual features of the political course pursued by the highest bureaucracy. It is probably for this reason that the relatively small draft law clearly reflects the change in national policy priorities from a broad program of Russification of the outskirts to the formation of a "national core" of Russia, marks the boundaries of transformations that are politically acceptable to the government, and finally reveals the complex internal logic of the reform process, which is not always obvious from the outside.