Russia and Courtly Europe: Ritual and the Culture of Diplomacy, 1648–1725 by Jan Hennings (review)

Abstract

SEER, 95, 4, OCTOBER 2017 766 Ufa, Andrei Ukhtomskii, sought to strengthen and police the boundaries of Orthodoxy by identifying it still more strongly with Russian nationality. On the eve of revolution, many of the threads that bound Bashkiria to the empire were unravelling, but they would be restored in somewhat different form in the early Soviet period, when, as Daniel Schafer has shown, Bashkiria became one of the crucibles of Soviet nationalities policy. Steinwedel is surely correct that Bashkiria is crucial to understanding wider patterns of Russian imperial governance, between the colonial separation visible in Central Asia and the attempt to create a more homogenous national core through assimilation in European Russia: ‘Bashkiria was located geographically just at the point where the two forms of governance met’ (p. 251). His book is thus both a skilful exercise in local and regional history, and an important contribution to the history of Imperial Russia as a whole. New College, University of Oxford Alexander Morrison Hennings, Jan. Russia and Courtly Europe: Ritual and the Culture of Diplomacy, 1648–1725. New Studies in European History. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York, 2016. xii + 297pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £64.99. Russia’s integration into the European states-system, achieved by the establishment of permanent diplomatic representatives in Western capitals, is conventionally dated to the era of the Great Northern War (1700–21) and viewed as a dimension of the ‘westernizing’ policies pursued by Peter the Great (1694–1725). Jan Hennings’ fine new study overturns many of these established assumptions, and substitutes a much more sophisticated and convincing framework for what was a key political transformation, for the rest of Europe as well as for Russia. Pointing to the ambition of earlier Muscovite diplomacy, particularly from the reign of Peter’s father Alexis (1645–76) onwards, he argues that changes around 1700 built more on previous Russian developments than on imitation of the French diplomatic system perfected during the second half of Louis XIV’s long reign (1661–1715). Impressive research on widely scattered manuscript material, together with notably wide reading in printed sources and secondary literature alike, enables him to demonstrate the extent to which the Posol´skii prikaz (‘Ambassadorial’ or ‘Foreign Affairs Chancellery’), established as long ago as 1549, became increasingly important and also independent during the second half of the seventeenth century, as Russia sought to find allies against the Ottoman Empire. One established explanation for Muscovy/Russia’s slow diplomatic emergence has been an ignorance of Europe’s languages, but this cannot be REVIEWS 767 sustained in the light of Dr Hennings’s revelation that there were no fewer than 84 translators and 185 interpreters active between 1645 and 1682 (p. 76). While many of these men provided the linguistic skills needed to send periodic missions to Central Asia and to eastern and northern Europe, a significant proportion were able to handle central and western European languages. The linguistic barriers to expanded diplomatic contacts were thus far less serious than usually believed. A more serious obstacle to the development of Russian diplomacy was the relatively late establishment of a reliable postal system extending as far east as Moscow; this only really began to be created from the 1660s. Until that point Muscovite diplomats, in contrast to their European counterparts, were unable to maintain a regular correspondence with their superiors during their mission, instead presenting a consolidated report when they returned, a practice firmly established by 1600. Yet the Posol´skii prikaz was becoming a sizeable and important agency of government during the second half of the seventeenth century, with up to thirty ‘undersecretaries’ in post and perhaps as many as fifty during the 1670s (p. 75), together with increasing functional specialization. It was able to provide improved and more sophisticated control over policy than hitherto appreciated, and Dr Hennings’s account of its evolution will be of considerable value to anyone interested in Muscovite governance. The detailed account of the administrative framework (chapter 2), valuable though it is, is preparatory to the real heart of the book: an imaginative study of ceremony and protocol in Russian diplomacy. This incorporates the insights of what is known as the ‘Münster...