THE INFLUENCE OF THE ENVOY REZANOV’ S ACTIONS ON THE OUTCOME OF THE EMBASSY MISSION AND ON THE SUBSEQUENT EVENTS IN RUSSO-JAPANESE RELATIONS

Abstract

The article examines the influence of the personality of the Russian ambassador Nikolai Petrovich Rezanov on Russian-Japanese relations. The embassy of Nikolai Petrovich Rezanov to Japan ended in failure and gave rise to new sad events in Russian-Japanese relations. Among such events are the Khvostov incident (also known as the Rezanov-Davydov-Khvostov incident), when some Japanese villages and crafts on Sakhalin were robbed and burned, and the Golovnin incident, when the Russian navigator Vasily Mikhailovich Golovnin was captured by the Japanese and held in captivity for two years. The author made an attempt to find out the role of the personality of the envoy in all the listed events. An analysis of historiography has shown that researchers have repeatedly turned to the results of Rezanov’s embassy and to the analysis of his personality, coming to opposite conclusions about the envoy’s absolute guilt or complete innocence in the failure of the mission. The involvement of a wide range of sources, as well as the use of the induction method, allowed the author to come to new conclusions: the failure was not in one, but in a complex of reasons. Along with such reasons as poorly selected goods and the prejudiced attitude of the Japanese of that time towards the Russian people, the actions of Nikolai Petrovich influenced the failure of the mission. However, the main role was played by the isolation policy of the Japanese state, which, having begun in the middle of the 17th century, was firmly entrenched in Japanese society. As for the role of the envoy in relations with Japan, it is greatest in the sad story of the robbery of Japanese villages, which had a negative impact on relations with Japan.