As its capitulation was followed by the rapid collapse of Swedish resistance elsewhere, and ultimately the Russian conquest of Finland, the siege is often regarded as the decisive battle of the war.

[3] A week before the war began, Sveaborg's commander Admiral Carl Olof Cronstedt received a letter from the King Gustav IV Adolf which required him to fit for operations and acquire crews for two hemmema-type archipelago frigates and over 70 smaller gunboats or yawls.

Instead of attacking the numerically inferior besieger, the Swedes were content to stay behind their fortifications and prepare for the Russian assault by sawing a ditch to the open the ice around the fortress.

[7] On 6 April Cronstedt agreed with Jan Pieter van Suchtelen, the Russian commander in Helsinki, on an honourable capitulation on 3 May if Swedish reinforcements didn't reach Sveaborg by then.

Even if the couriers had arrived earlier, Sveaborg probably could not have been relieved by the fleet, as the winter was unusually cold and the Baltic Sea was still partially frozen at the time.

As Sveaborg had long been regarded as the strongest fortress in Finland, and as Swedish resistance collapsed relatively quickly after its fall, the siege there soon came to be seen as having been the decisive engagement of the war.

Moreover, the fact that Sveaborg had capitulated after a siege of just two months, despite its formidable reputation, led to suspicions of cowardice or even outright treason being levelled against Cronstedt, and he was soon singled out as the chief scapegoat for the Swedish defeat.

He wisely chose to stay in Finland after being released from Russian captivity, but he was nevertheless tried for treason in Sweden, found guilty and condemned to death in absentia.

As a result of the official condemnation of Cronstedt as a traitor, and the psychological need to find a scapegoat for the disastrous defeat in the Finnish War, most Swedes soon came to accept the idea that he was bribed to surrender Sveaborg.

The questions as to whether Sveaborg could potentially have continued resisting for longer, and whether Cronstedt was "right" to surrender, are open ones and are still debated in Finnish and Swedish historiography to this day.

The poems are strongly nationalist in tone, and Cronstedt is unequivocally assigned sole blame for the Swedish defeat in the war, with the last three verses of Sveaborg calling for him to be subject to damnatio memoriae: Hide away his family, do not mention his tribe, Do not turn away from his crime.

Both "The Fortress" and "Under Siege", in which time travellers from a dystopian future affect the outcome, can be found in Martin's collection of short stories Dreamsongs, published by Bantam.