From a Russian Guberniya to Part of Finland: The Legislative Position of the Orthodox Church and People in the Grand Duchy of Finland in the Nineteeth Century

Abstract

What is today the Republic of Finland, had since the twelfth century been more or less a part of Sweden. In 1807 Russia promised to support the French supremacy policy in Western Europe in return for French support for the Russian seizure of Finland. A year later, Russia invaded Finland and occupied the whole country. In the 1809 Treaty of Fredikshamn (in Finnish, Hamina), Finland was annexed to Russia as an autonomous Grand Duchy. Three years later the southeastern part of Finland, the so-called 'Old Finland, or what in Russian was called the guberniya of Vyborg (in Finnish, Viipuri) — a territory Russia had taken between 1721 and 1743 — was incorporated into the rest of Finland. An overwhelming majority of around twenty-five to thirty thousand Orthodox people on Finnish soil lived in that territory, particularly in the Finno-Russian border area called Karelia. Administratively they were part of the Metropolinate of St Petersburg, although their closest superior was the Spiritual Board (later Consistory) at Vyborg (a town close to St Petersburg). At the local level they were divided into eight Finnish or Karelian-speaking parishes. In addition, there were three Russian-speaking parishes consisting of a few thousand members. During the nineteenth century, new parishes were established so that in 1890, there were 26 parishes with nearly 51 000 members, of which some one-fifth were Russian-speaking. The Orthodox made up some two per cent of the whole Finnish population; the rest were Lutherans.