'Revolution was in the Air' : British Officials in Russia during the First World War

Abstract

The first English diplomats who arrived in Russia during the second half of the sixteenth century viewed the country with a mixture of repulsion and fascination. Giles Fletcher, who was sent to Russia by Elizabeth I in 1588, condemned 'the open and barbarous' system of government which denied even the most elementary freedoms and security to the population.' Fletcher's successors in the following centuries generally took the same view, though the more intelligent among them recognized that the centralization of power in the hands of a single ruler probably represented the only effective means of establishing political order in a vast and potentially anarchic empire. By the beginning of the twentieth century, British officials in Petersburg may no longer have considered the Russian political system to be a 'plaine tyranicall' form of oriental despotism. Nevertheless, while two hundred years of integration into the European state system had helped to make Russia more familiar to the political and diplomatic elites of Western Europe, the autocratic system of government continued to offend the sensibilities of many British representatives who were posted to the Russian capital. Although the composition of the British Diplomatic Service was changing rapidly by the beginning of the century, it continued to draw the vast majority of its members from the aristo