A Note on Some European Foreign Office Archives and Russian Domestic History, 1790-1812

In: Slavic review: interdisciplinary quarterly of Russian, Eurasian and East European studies, Band 23, Heft 3, S. 531-536

Abstract

The use of foreign office materials for domestic history is by no means new, but Russian historians have done very little with this kind of research. One reason is that the Russians themselves have not needed to, and in recent years the turn toward social and intellectual history has seemed to make the diplomats' comments on court and society superficial if not irrelevant. This impression is actually erroneous, and non-Soviet scholars will find diplomatic archives a rich resource in themselves and an excellent supplement for published materials. This essay describes materials for Russian internal history from the Haus-, Hof-, und Staatsarchiv, the Archives du Ministere des Affaires Etrangeres, and the Public Record Office. The author read these archives for the period 1790-1812 looking for material on Russian reform policies to supplement information collected from published sources. The results were so gratifying that a summary of them should be of value to other scholars engaged on projects in prerevolutionary Russian domestic history.