The Russian Empire
Question & Answer

What Was the Treaty of Nystad?

At 11 in the evening of 30 August 1721, in a wooden house in the Finnish town of Nystad, the Russian and Swedish plenipotentiaries signed the peace that ended the Great Northern War of 1700-1721. The Russian delegation was led by General Jacob Bruce and the future statesman Andrei Osterman; the Swedish by Baron Johan Lillienstedt and Otto Reinhold Strömfelt. About a month later, on 22 October 1721, the Russian Senate, the governing body of the new imperial Russia, proclaimed that the Tsar was to be “Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias” — the title that was to last until 1917. The Treaty of Nystad, in short, is the document that made the Russian Empire (see Hughes, Peter the Great, 2010; Massie, Peter the Great, 1980).

The opening of the war

The Great Northern War had begun in 1700, when the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I, the King of Denmark-Norway, the Elector of Saxony and King of Poland Augustus II, and Tsar Peter I formed an alliance against the Swedish Empire. The alliance’s opening campaign was a disaster: at Narva on 20 November 1700, Charles XII’s Swedish army of about 8,000 destroyed a Russian army of about 35,000 and captured all of its artillery. The next nine years were the slow reconstruction of the Russian army, the gradual advance of the allies, and the slow exhaustion of the Swedish Empire. The Russian position was recovered in the campaigns of 1701-1704; the Swedish position was decisively broken at the Battle of Poltava of 8 July 1709.

The negotiations

Negotiations were opened on Peter’s initiative in 1710, then intermittently through the 1710s. The first Russian demands were maximalist: Livonia, Estonia, Ingria, and the rest of the Swedish Baltic provinces; the cession of Viborg and the Kexholm part of Finland; and a war indemnity. The Swedish position was hardened by the determination of the new king, Charles XII’s sister Ulrika Eleonora, and her husband Frederick I, to recover what could be recovered.

The decisive moment came with the Russian occupation of Finland in 1713-1714. The Russian Baltic fleet, built in the 1700s and expanded in the 1710s, defeated the Swedish navy at Hangö (Hangö Udde) on 27 July 1714, and the next year the Russian army was in the Swedish heartland. The Swedish government agreed to negotiate seriously. The talks at Nystad opened on 24 May 1721 and lasted about three months, with the Russian negotiator Jacob Bruce and Osterman pressing for the Russian terms and the Swedish Lillienstedt and Strömfelt trying to limit the indemnity (Hughes, 2010).

The terms of the treaty

The treaty was made up of 24 articles and several separate declarations. The principal articles did four things:

  • They ceded to Russia Livonia, Estonia, Ingria, and the southeastern part of Finland, including the Karelian Isthmus and the city of Viborg.
  • They returned to Sweden the rest of Finland, including the city of Turku (Åbo).
  • They required Russia to pay an indemnity of two million silver thalers to Sweden, in exchange for a Russian import tax on Swedish goods for four years.
  • They established a system of mutual trade preferences and a free movement of grain between the two states.

The ceded territory, with a population of about 1.5 million (mostly Estonian, Latvian, and German speakers), and the cities of Riga, Reval, Dorpat, Pernau, Narva, and Viborg, gave Russia the Baltic coastline it had sought since the reign of Ivan III. The Swedish empire, which had dominated the Baltic region since the 1610s, became a regional power overnight (Massie, 1980).

The proclamation of the Russian Empire

The treaty was celebrated in Russia as the achievement of the three-century-old project of gaining access to the Baltic. The Senate, the governing body of the new imperial Russia, commissioned a special medal to commemorate the event, with the inscription “За труды и храбрость” (“For labours and valour”). On 22 October 1721, in the Trinity Cathedral in St Petersburg, the Metropolitan of Kiev, Stefan Yavorsky, proclaimed Peter “the Great” and “Father of the Fatherland” and “Emperor of All the Russias.” The Senate ratified the title two days later, on 24 October. The Russian Empire was born (Hughes, 2010).

The aftermath

The treaty did not immediately bring peace to the Baltic. The Swedish Riksdag was reluctant to ratify the cession, and the Russian garrisons in Finland had to be reinforced in 1722-1723; the last Swedish territorial concession, the surrender of the Finnish frontier, was completed only in 1743 in the Treaty of Åbo. But the new border — a border that ran from the eastern Karelian Isthmus along the Neva to the Baltic, and along the former Polish-Lithuanian boundary through Livonia, Estonia, and the eastern Baltic — was the border of the Russian Empire until 1917.