Heinrich Gross of Würtemberg: A Diplomat on Elizabeth Petrovna's Service

Author(s):  
Maksim Anisimov

Heinrich Gross was a diplomat of the Empress of Russia Elizabeth Petrovna, a foreigner on the Russian service who held some of the most important diplomatic posts of her reign. As the head of Russian diplomatic missions in European countries, he was an immediate participant in the rupture of both Franco-Russian and Russo-Prussian diplomatic relations and witnessed the beginning of the Seven Years' War, while in the capital of Saxony, besieged by Prussian troops. After that H. Gross was one of the members of the collective leadership of the Russian Collegium of Foreign Affairs. So far there is only one biographic essay about him written in the 19th century. The aims of this article are threefold. Using both published foreign affairs-related documentation and diplomatic documents stored in the Archive of the Foreign Policy of the Russian Empire, it attempts to systematize the materials of the biography of this important participant in international events. It also seeks to assess his professional qualities and get valuable insight into his role both in the major events of European politics and in the implementation of the foreign policy of the Russian Empire in the mid-18th century. Moreover, the account of the diplomatic career of H. Gross presented in this essay aims to generate genuine interest among researchers in the personality and professional activities of one of the most brilliant Russian diplomats of the Enlightenment Era.

2018 ◽  
pp. 892-901
Author(s):  
Dmitry V. Vasilyev ◽  

The article reviews major groups of sources on the administration policy of the Russian Empire in the Kazakh steppe in the 18th century and in the first half of the 19th century. Acts of law and legislative drafts make up the first group. Materials of the Asian and the Siberian Committees, supreme bodies directly involved in imperial policy-making in the Kazakh steppe, form the second group. Official correspondence (dispatches, official reports, statements, official notes, directions, and letters) of the major regional and central authorities that concern the carrying out the state policy in the southeast periphery are included in the third group. Studying laws, bills, and supporting materials allows not just to highlight changes in governmental views over time, but also to understand basic principles underlying state policies. Legislation concerning the Kazakh steppe was deposited in the archives of the State Council, the Governing Senate, the Committee of Ministers, the Asian Committee, the Siberian Committee, the Asian Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Some pertinent materials can be found in papers of the Siberian Prikaz and, in some measure, of the Ambassadorial Prikaz: they contain documents on the establishment of diplomatic and trade relations with the Kazakhs. Fonds of the governing bodies of the Russian Empire store unpublished legislation and documents on the legislative process (drafts, materials for their discussion, etc.), correspondence of high-ranking officials with regional administration and traditional Kazakh elite. Some legal documents of imperial lawmaking are deposited in archival fonds of central governing bodies – the Collegium of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and the Ministry of War. A sizeable portion of materials on discussions of legislative drafts is stored in regional archives, in fonds of local (regional) administrative agencies (boards, offices of military governors and governor generals) and in the Central State Archive of the Republic of Kazakhstan.


Author(s):  
K.Yu. Anders-Namzhilova

The article describes the problem of searching for unknown manuscripts in the study of new spiritual literature that occurred in the Russian Empire at the turn of 18th century. The documents of Moscow Ecclesiastical Censor’s Archive are the main information source of church and religious materials written during that period. The Moscow Ecclesiastical Censor was the first specialized authority established by Synod in 1799 for considering the religious compositions. Compositions which were banned by censors couldn’t be printed and for this reason they become unknown even for modern scientific society. However, a lot of these compositions weren’t lost: they are kept in manuscripts which are dispersed throughout different archive and library funds, that’s why they cannot be attributed without the engagement of the censor committee’s archive documents.


Slovene ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 543-553
Author(s):  
Gleb Pilipenko

[Rev. of: Rjéoutski V., Frijhoff W., eds., Language Choice in Enlightenment Europe: Education, Sociability, and Governance, Amsterdam, 2018, 233 pp.] The book under review is an English-language collective monograph called “Language Choice in Enlightenment Europe: Education, Sociability, and Governance”, written by authors from the Netherlands, Italy, Russia, Estonia, and Croatia (edited by Vladislav Rjéoutski and Willem Frijhoff). The subject of the monograph is the language choice in the European countries of the 18th century. This is the sixth book in the Languages and Cultures in History series, and it includes an introduction, eight articles by the international team of authors, and an alphabetical index of names and places mentioned. The Enlightenment was marked in Europe by the gradual abandonment of Latin in education and public administration and its replacement by vernaculars. At the same time, there are peculiarities in every country, particularly in the Russian Empire and Croatia. Archival materials (private letters, memoirs, official questionnaires, statistics) make this book extremely valuable. The authors analyse the linguistic situation in France, the Netherlands, Central Germany, the Estonian Governorate, Croatia, the Hungarian Kingdom, and the Russian Empire. Language choice is discussed at the micro-level (e.g. within one family) as well as at the macro-level (e.g., in education, public administration, among the nobility or clergy). The book will be of great interest to historians, linguists, sociologists, anthropologists, as well as to specialists in international relations.


2013 ◽  
Vol 1 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 104-119

This paper discusses the interaction between the discourses of empire and nation as it emerged in the debates about the proper object of research and the criteria for legitimacy of the newly founded discipline of ethnography in the Russian Empire in the last decades of the 18th and throughout the 19th century. A special emphasis will be laid upon the particular features of the appearance and evolution of ethnographic preoccupations in the Russian Empire starting with the second half of the 18th century, when the first attempts at the synthesis and classification of ethnographic enquiries can be discerned, and spanning the first half of the 19th century. In this context, the case of Bessarabia represents an illustrative example of the uneasy interaction between the specialized and supposedly “objective” knowledge of learned experts and the agendas of the central and local authorities and officials. My basic goal has been to uncover the relationship between the “imperial” and the “universalistic” dimensions of Russian ethnography.


2018 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
pp. 229-247
Author(s):  
Arkadiusz Fastyn

The thesis discusses the signifi cant question of inter-denominational marriages in Poland prior to 1946. Until the end of 1945, the laws in force in Poland were the 19th-century statutes. They had been enacted by the neighbouring countries (Austria, Russia and Prussia) that partitioned the Polish territory in the second half of the 18th century. In the Polish lands enjoying some autonomy in the Russian Empire, the regulation of marriage was based on the religious principles of 1836. Under the 1836 statute, there could be no civil marriage that would not produce a confessional effect. Consequently, the regulation of marriage had to combine confessional and civil effects into single norms and the legislative authorities had to provide for mechanisms correlating such effects. This applied to both the conclusion and dissolution of marriage. In these matters, the Roman Catholic Church adopted an uncompromising stance following from its belief in the special theological character of the sacrament of marriage.


Author(s):  
M. V. Loskutova ◽  
A. A. Fedotova

Based on published and archival sources, the paper considers the transformations in Russian legislation and administrative policies on forest beekeeping (harvesting honey from owned or tended nests in forests) in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It demonstrates how in the course of the eighteenth century, the ownership of bee nests started violating the concept of absolute private property over forests, which was increasingly incompatible with the rights of other individuals to exploit natural resources on the same territory. From the early decades of the 19th century, borders were gradually demarcated between forested areas belonging to the state and private owners, and between the state forests and those designated for the use of state peasants. This process made possible to exercise the concept of absolute private property over forests in practice. These changes in legislation and the forest cadastre were closely linked to the making of ‘forestry science’ that developed in the late 18th century under the influence of a growing demand for timber needed for the navies and merchant fleets of all European states. The precepts of ‘forestry science’ were dictated by its objective to maximise profits by focusing on the production of commercially valuable sorts of timber. By the early 19th century, this logic prompted the forest administration of the Russian empire to start contemplating measures that would obstruct any alternative forms of forest exploitation, such as harvesting honey from tended trees. The paper considers in details the tightening of administrative regulations in this area, as imposed by the Ministry of State Domains that reached its peak in the Great Reforms era, and analyses the mechanisms that translated these general causes at work into specific policies.


Author(s):  
Elena Kudriavtseva

Apollinary Petrovich Butenev was at the head of the Russian embassy in Constantinople from 1830 till 1843. These were the years of the most stable Turkish-Russian relations in the first half of the 19th century. As the envoy to Constantinople, A. Butenev was one of the most significant Russian representatives abroad, while the position in Constantinople was one of the most important postings in the Russian Foreign Ministry service since the city was a kind of international political centre that had a huge impact on the life of the whole of Europe. A. Butenev’s diplomatic endeavours never generated a lot of interest among Russian historians, even though many scholars thoroughly analyzed the period of the Russian-Turkish relations during his service in Constantinople multiple times. The 1830s and 1840s are marked by several important events in foreign policy in which the Russian envoy was directly involved. First of all, А. Butenev played a decisive role in the drafting of the Treaty of Hünkâr İskelesi that was signed in 1833. The Bosphorus expedition of 1833 was a unique military and political operation of its time, unparalleled in the history of Russian diplomacy. Usually, the success of the expedition is associated with the names of A.F. Orlov and N.N. Muravyov, while the chance to conclude this treaty that was extremely beneficial for Russia belongs to A. Butenev. This is indicated by numerous internal memoranda and reports he sent to St. Petersburg. With his experience in diplomatic affairs, political weight in the international circles, and the ability to make independent decisions, Apollinary Petrovich Butenev adequately and successfully represented the interests of his homeland in the crucial period when the Russian Empire formulated and implemented its concept of the Eastern policy.


Author(s):  
Andrey S. Ryazhev ◽  

Introduction. The article concentrates on the religious policy of the Russian Empire in the Early Modern Time. For the first time in historiography, a study was carried out concerning the place of Catholic missionaries who settled on the southern outskirts of Russia, in the religious policy of Russian secular and spiritual authorities. Materials and methods. The base of the study was the correspondence of the Collegium of Foreign Affairs with the Holy Synod, as well as other institutions and officials, characterizing the scale of the presence and direction of activity of Catholic orders on the territory of Russia. The methodology of the study has been determined by the structural and functional approach to the system of state bodies of Russia. In combination with this approach, a historical-genetic method was used, which is optimal for understanding the evolution of the structure of power in the Russian Empire from the time of Peter the Greatto the middle of the reign of Empress Elizaveta Petrovna. The results of the research are presented in the section “Catholic missionaries in the south of Russia by the middle of the 18th century: political and diplomatic aspects”. In it, the Capuchin Order is designated as the most active force of Catholic missionary work in the Russian south, which managed to prevail over others Catholic orders in dispute for influencing on the ethno-confessional groups of the studied region. It has been determined that the Capuchins in Russia gained constant diplomatic support from the Austrian monarchy. The activity of missionaries in Astrakhan and Nizhyn was traced, the place of the Armenian communities in the missionary plans of the Capuchins on the territory of Russia is shown. The influence on the position of the Capuchins of Russian-Austrian relations is emphasized, in particular of the “Austrian system” — the orientation of Russian diplomacy towards the Austrian court. The idea is carried out that the attitude of the Russian authorities in the capital and in the localities towards the Capuchins in such conditions was indifferent or patronizing, while in fact the Russian secular authorities did not take into account the violation of the prerogatives of the ruling Orthodox (Greek-Russian) church. In order of discussion (part “Missionaries in the Russian Borderlands: source study andhistoriographical observations” of the abovementioned section of the article), the main interpretations of Catholic missionaryism, found in the literature on Catholicism in Russia, have been identified. Conclusion. The author states that the reasons for the interest of Catholic missionaries to the southern Russian outskirts and their population were objective. The reaction of the Russian secular authorities to such an interest was little, and their awareness of the legal necessity of appropriate regulatory measures developed slowly.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document