"War and Peace"

Service Description

When the Tsar of Russia, Nicholas II, lost the Russo-Japanese War (February 1904 to September 1905), most of his Baltic Sea Fleet had been destroyed, the one he needed to defend St. Petersburg. Without sufficient funds and time to build new ships (the next war against Germany was coming sooner rather than later), with the advancement in Russian coastal artillery and sea mines, his military advisers created a brilliant plan based on a previous well-tested strategy. The key to this defensive strategy would be Suomenlinna, located at the Tallinn-Porkkala third line. Suomenlinna’s casements and storage facilities could house a vast number of provisions, military equipment, ammunition, and personnel, meaning its forward position in the Gulf of Finland could be a staging ground to launch counterattacks into the German Army’s flanks, if they attempted to attack St. Petersburg by land either across southern Finland or the northern Baltic States. From their disaster at Port Arthur, the Russians realised Suomenlinna could be blockaded by the German High Seas Fleet and then the German Army could attack Helsinki from the north and bombard not only all the ships in Helsinki harbour, but also Suomenlinna itself. To oppose the long-range land-based artillery from the north, to surround Suomenlinna in protective land-based curtain walls, from 1912 to 1918 (with the Russians directing), thousands of labourers constructed thirty-four Fortified Bases using Finnish labour primarily, consisting of hundreds of kilometres of rifle bays and storage depots, communication trenches and traverses, hundreds of machine gun bunkers and over 120 artillery gun emplacements (approximately 500 guns), and countless wire obstacles covered by searchlights. On this “War and Peace” tour, you’ll learn the military architecture of Suomenlinna and learn how its principles shaped the military architecture of the WWI Land Fortifications during the “Battle of Leppävaara" (April, 1918).