Helsinki of the czars1996

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. Schoolfield's book portrays the many transformations that took place in an increasingly bilingual environment (where, ultimately, the street signs became trilingual!). The national-romantic passions led, in the fin-de-siecle and later, to a remarkable outburst of creative activity - the music of Sibelius, the painting of Edelfelt and Gallen-Kallela, the architecture of Saarinen and Sonck, the literature of Tavaststjerna and Eino Leino. The political and social tensions culminated in Finland's independence, on December 6, 1917, and the bloody Finnish Civil War of 1918, in which C. G. Mannerheim, a former Czarist calvary general, emerged as the leader of the victorious Whites.