270 REVERIES
Finland was ruled until 1917 as a separate constitutional monarchy of which the
Tsar was the hereditary Grand Duke. Hence the question is posed as to why
the Grand Duchy of Finland should have survived and prospered whilst the
Kingdom of Poland should have been so regularly harried and in the end
destroyed. Surely, it might be argued, if the Russian government was so com-
pletely opposed in principle to all forms of independence and national liberty, it
would certainly have found some pretext for treating the Finns to the same dis-
play of imperial will that was exercised against the Poles. The usual answer,
implied if not always explicit, is that the Poles brought their misfortunes on
themselves. According to current stereotypes, the Poles were troublemakers,
whilst the Finns were jovial, law-abiding citizens; the Finns were responsible
members of the great Russian family whilst the Poles were not. Unfortunately,
this simple answer avoids the crux of the matter. It is undeniable that Poland
had produced more than its share of troublemakers. Both the November and the
January Risings were sparked off by men who were intent on causing as much
trouble for the Russians as they could. Similar bloody-mindedness was to make
itself apparent on numerous occasions in the future. But it must still be decided
whether these Polish 'hooligans' behaved as they did from a combination of
original sin and national character, or whether they were reacting to intolerable
provocations. Before concluding that the Poles were more irresponsible than the
Finns by nature, it is necessary to show firstly that the Polish troublemakers
were somehow representative of the nation as a whole, and secondly that they
were subjected to the same experiences as the Finns. On this last score, it is not
difficult to enumerate several important differences. For one thing, the Congress
Kingdom occupied the most important strategic location of the entire Russian
lands. It lay astride Russia's landbridge to Europe and to Germany in particu-
lar; Finland lay on the fringe of Scandinavia, with no direct link except with the
Norwegian Arctic and with Swedish Lapland. For strategic reasons, if for noth-
ing else, the Russian government was bound to respond much more sharply to
political insubordination in Poland than to similar disturbances in Finland.
Strategic considerations occasioned the presence in Poland of massive Russian
armies, and the armies in their turn to a wide range of frictions with the civilian
population. For another thing, the Poles of the Congress Kingdom formed part
of a nation whose members in Austria, Prussia, and Lithuania shared their sense
of a common identity. They constantly posed the Russian government with the
potential threat of irredentism, which could not have been removed unless all
the Poles had been coralled into one state. The Grand Duchy of Finland, in con-
trast, contained practically the whole of the much smaller Finnish nation, which
looked to Russia for protection against its former Swedish masters. What is
more, the Poles were Slavs. According to the ancient Muscovite canon, all Slavs
were brothers; all were the natural subjects of the Tsar; and all could be treated
as his chattels, his little 'Christian souls'. The Finns, who were not Slavs, were
seen as foreigners living under Russian protection, and as such belonged to a dif-
ferent category of humanity. In the Russian view, together with the Germans of