Le Nord : revue internationale des Pays de Nord - 01.06.1942, Page 266

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LE NORD
glorious peace,” as Gustavus Adolphus called it, furthermore
rounded off the territory of Finland by the addition of the pro-
vince of Keksholm, so that the boundaries of the country were
now pushed forward to Lake Ladoga. At the same time, the
Swedish dominions were extended beyond the line of the Syster-
báck river by the annexation of Ingria, so that they now com-
prised the Southern coast of the Gulf of Finland as well: Russia
was excluded from the Baltic for nearly a hundred years to come.
Recently there has been some criticism in Finnish quarters
of our common leaders in the past: it is complained that they
shirked the problem of Eastern Karelia, and that they neglected
the task of achieving a safer strategic frontier on this front, in
their eagerness to pursue more ambitious, but delusive schemes.
To this criticism several replies might be made. Actually, Charles
IX had the ensuring of such a safer frontier in view. As it was,
Gustavus Adolphus and Axel Oxenstierna had only achieved the
Stolbova frontier after a stubborn and protracted struggle during
which men of weaker will might often have been tempted to
give up. That a large portion of the sum for the redemption of
Elfsborg was spent on carrying on the Russian war is perhaps
a less well-known, but very significant fact.
With the Peace of Stolbova, the Eastern frontier to the North
of the Gulf of Finland had received the same form in which it
was later on taken over by Finland when the latter became an
independent State. That this should have been so is indeed a
remarkable and surprising fact, for the collapse of Sweden as
a great power during the Great Northern War appeared to in-
augurate a process which might have been expected to render
such a consummation impossible. The peace treaties of Nystad
in 1721 and Ábo in 1743 severed valuable territories from Fin-
land and gave them to Russia. More especially, the frontier
established by the peace of 1743 along the Kymmene river and
Lake Saimen was far from satisfactory from the point of view
of defensive strategy. This is not to say that this line could
not have been held, but in actual fact it was not held, in spite
of the existence of the supposedly impregnable fortress of Svea-
borg. The last peace which Sweden concluded with Russia, that
of Frederikshamn in 1809, involved, above all, the loss of Fin-
land and the Áland Islands. The frontier which was now drawn
along the Torne and Muonio Rivers meant an additional muti-
lation of the Swedish Kingdom: a strip of Swedish Vásterbotten