Discussion
Russian relations with the Scandinavian kingdoms in the mid-nineteenth century are often obscured in studies of imperial diplomacy and borderland policy. In diplomatic history, Russia’s conflicts and alliances with the Great Powers usually take center stage, while the porous and shifting frontiers of the Caucasus, Central Asia, and the Far East attract far more attention than the seemingly stable, almost frozen North. By tracing the paper trail of the Russian consul general in Christiania, Henrik Adolf Mechelin – an agent who was both mobile himself and responsible for monitoring cross-border mobility – I seek to reconsider this picture. Mechelin was able both to observe and to act upon the interconnectedness and mobility of the Greater North, stretching from Arkhangelsk gubernia to Bergen, during a period of active imperial modernization.
Given his duties as consul general in Norway, a position that made him an important figure in gathering political and economic intelligence, Mechelin closely observed the emergence of transnational and potentially perilous tendencies in Northern Europe. The pan-Scandinavian movement, the political mobilization of the masses, and the radical democratization of representative institutions all embodied a threat to the more conservative future of the region envisioned by the imperial administration. At the same time, the economic modernization of the northern peripheries – above all Finnmark – together with the reform of archaic political institutions and infrastructural development in Sweden–Norway offered a model of successful progress under conditions of limited resources. Mechelin believed that this experience could prove valuable for the future development of the Arctic frontiers of the Russian Empire along the Murman coast.
Mechelin’s career – as a graduate of the University of Helsingfors, a censor at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in St. Petersburg, consul general in Christiania, visionary of Murman Coast colonization, and finally a senator of the Grand Duchy of Finland – testifies to the interconnection of regional competences. The period of the Great Reforms, in turn, enabled a consul from Europe’s periphery to become an important voice in matters of imperial significance. Drawing on previously untapped sources from federal and regional archives in Russia, the National Archives of Finland, and published materials, I demonstrate that Mechelin’s career and life trajectory reflected two interrelated processes: the connectedness of the Greater North and the modernization of the Russian Empire, whose borderlands, including Finland and the Murman coast, became arenas of contestation for competing reform projects.
