Full resolution (JPEG) - On this page / på denna sida - XIX. Sweden in 1915
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products which before the war were exclusively imported
from Germany. The excellent Swedish engineers and
scientists—generally accurate and honest—would with
advantage replace certain representatives of German
Kultur who came to make fortunes in our country. In
entire branches of modern progress—in telephony for
instance—the Swedes could initiate the Russians into
their methods and their wonderful instruments.
Besides we should derive real profit from the closer
study of the political and social organisation of Sweden
and from borrowing certain ideas and certain institutions
from this people whose country has so many analogies
with all the immense North of Russia. Peter the
Great had taken the administration and fiscal
organisation of Sweden and transplanted it in bulk into his empire,
a work which was afterwards spoilt by his weak and
stupid successors; the Swedish nobiliary constitution
was later on the centre of attraction for the enlightened
minds of the Russian nobility—the only class who were
at all cultivated in the Russia of the eighteenth century;
these tendencies ended in the reforms of Catherine II.,
reforms which might have been the beginning of the true
political and social progress of Russia if the Prussophile
manias of the great Empress’s successors had not come
to spoil and annul her work. Undoubtedly ever since
the days of the Värings and Rurik there has been an
affinity and something akin to a mysterious link between
the Scandinavian countries and the North of Russia;
and the periods in which these links were severed and
forgotten were not exactly the happy periods of Russian
history.
Such were the plans and the dreams that I allowed
myself to indulge in while the storm of the war was still
raging. Awful ruin has overwhelmed Russia since then,
and seems to forbid us to indulge even in dreams and
hopes for the future. All the same, I still believe in the
correctness of the impressions that my stay in Sweden
left on me. And that is why I allow myself to look with
equanimity on one of the consequences of our present
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