Swedish attitudes toward Russia in the 19th c

[lord of the mark]

Yup, Ive been playing Victoria, as Sweden.

In that game, as Sweden, youre pretty much inevitably focused on the threat from the East.

In real life, how much of 19th century Swedish policy was oriented toward Russia? (yeah, i know about that big fort in the north) How much did that influence Swedish popular attitudes?

Why did Sweden stay out of WW1? Seems allying with the Central Powers would have been logical.

[Henrik]

Sweden was extremely scared of Russia throughout the 19th century. This was reflected in basicly anything they did. T'was just a few years earlier that the Russians recieved all of Finland as well as what was then a suburb of Stockholm (Åland, the island between Finland and Sweden).
They also landed near stockholm in that war.

Was a while since I read about this but:

There was a somewhat strong movement to join the central powers during ww1 in Sweden, those advocating it where refered to as "Activists".
These had the support of the king (and more importantly the Queen who was German herself).
The war years saw a rather unstable political structure and as I recall Sweden changed governments 3 times between Reactionary/conservatives (these where hand picked by the king), liberals and Socialists (the socialist party was also split in 1917 in an incident which according to some had Sweden at the brink of a revolution).

[Buck Birdseed]

I think Sweden staying out of WW1 was a stroke of good fortune - we really were at the brink. A couple of reasons why it didn't happen:

1) Neutrality was big in the rest of scandinavia at the time.

2) A strong national opinion for the liberals and social democrats, generally anti-"activists", who had to be comporomised with in the spirit of the "castle peace" government during the war. Basically, the king made a speech critical of the government in 1914, the liberal government under Karl Staaf resigned in response, and a new government containing members of all parties was undemocratically formed, where inter-party peace was concidered tantamount. The conservatives recieved concessions in the form of greatly increased defence grants, the liberals managed to keep sweden out of the war.