Summary:

Antti Räihä, Strangers in the House. The Burden of Billeting Russian Troops in Lappeenranta and Hamina in the Mid-Eighteenth Century

Early modern garrison towns have traditionally been studied from the point of view of the military forces. Although the civilians’ polar relationship with the armed forces has been noted, their strategic socio-economic plans on the one hand to capitalize on the presence of military and on the other hand to minimize the problems that it caused has been to a great extent ignored. This article concentrates on the problems involved billeting Russian troops in the towns of Lappeenranta and Hamina during the period from the 1740s to the 1760s. After the Peace Treaty of Turku (1743), these towns fell under Russian rule along with the rest of south-eastern Finland.

The townspeople, mostly burghers and artisans, of Lappeenranta and Hamina had already been obligated to billet soldiers and officers in their houses when the towns were still under Swedish rule. According to the Peace Treaty of Turku, the old Swedish laws, privileges and statutes as well as the old billeting practices were supposed to remain unchanged. However, it was difficult for the Russian troops to understand that a province bordering on the Swedish kingdom and lying close to the Russian capital had its own laws and statutes that differed from the norms of the Empire. The discord between the townspeople and the hundreds of men in the military was obvious. The soldiers were not under the jurisdiction of the local civilian courthouses, and questions relating to billeting in the towns often contravened the civil statutes.

The military population, which in the case of Russian officers often also included their families, interacted on a daily basis with the local inhabitants in myriad ways. I have shown in this article that despite their billeting obligation, the actions of the people of Lappeenranta and Hamina – from collective appeals to asserting the mastery of their own households – showed that they did not just submit passively to the demands made of them. I have also shown that, while the problems connected with billeting have previously often been treated as an issue between civilians and the military, in reality disagreements connected to billeting were also common between the civilians themselves. For example, disputes arose about who bore the heaviest billeting burden and who were obligated to quarter sick soldiers in their houses. The burden of billeting Russian troops was a fact that the townspeople of Lappeenranta and Hamina could not avoid, but in a long run it was also in the interest of the Russian administration that the billeting of troops should be handled as in as harmonious a way as possible.