The first part of this essayâs title is a reference to two earlier publications about the knowledge level of the Muscovite Posolâskii prikaz, the ambassadorial office (diplomatic chancery). One is Knud Rasmussenâs article about its information level in the sixteenth century, and the other Mikhail Alpatovâs essay on the same subject focusing on the seventeenth century.1 Rasmussen and Alpatov reached rather different conclusions. Relying mainly on the instructions to Muscovite ambassadors, Rasmussen showed that, to a considerable degree, the Kremlin was out of touch with current events in Europe. Alpatov, on the other hand, citing the reports (stateinye spiski) written by Muscovite emissaries when they returned home, painted a much more positive picture of the way in which the Kremlin kept abreast of international affairs. Of course there is much else we might cite here to provide a full review of the relevant literature, but my task is a more modest one: to sketch out ideas and some examples from work in progress, in which I am examining the mechanisms for acquiring foreign news, the reliability of that news, and the degree to which its acquisition may or may not have played a role in the actual formation of policy.
A priori we must recognise that what may have been the case in the middle of the sixteenth century certainly was not equally true a century later. The frequency and reliability of Muscovite contacts with other countries had grown
It is important to establish whether foreign policy decisions are based on accurate information and a clear understanding of international politics. Certainly there are many examples, even in our own day, of information overload, to illustrate how preconceived notions, wrong assumptions or misinformation led to bad decisions.4 Muscovy is no exception here, which does not mean that the Muscovite officials were in any way naïve about their sources. In fact, just the opposite seems to have been the case: they were very suspicious about the reliability of what they were told. The terms they used to describe information suggest as much: slukhi is commonly used to specify unverified rumour; ânam podlinno vedomoâ (âwe know for certainâ) generally introduces information deemed to have come from a reliable source. The need to verify news was taken seriously, especially in the situation where there was no single institutionalised mechanism for acquiring it. Ultimately, I think, what was important was the degree of personal trust in the source of information. In this regard, Muscovy was no different from the rest of Europe. Trusted agents often had proven their worth by carrying out specific commissions that may have had little to do with the acquisition of news.5 Such agents tended to have their own networks of reliable contacts and had secure channels of communication. While it would be wrong to label all acquisition of news through agents as espionage, such clandestine activity was everywhere to be found. Despite its importance, it has been the subject of too little systematic investigation.
Of course, even the most trusted agents might in fact prove to have been unworthy of that trust. They might deliberately or unwittingly mislead in what they reported. Vera Chentsovaâs work on some of the Greek reports on the Balkans and the Ottoman Empire illustrates very well the potential for deliberate deception on the part of those who wished to obtain Muscovite support of one
There is a longstanding belief that Muscovite foreign policy was handicapped by the near absence of permanent representatives or agents abroad. However, we need to be careful in assessing the impact of having or lacking long-term residents in foreign capitals.8 A comparative perspective is useful here. The reports sent to London by British residents posted in northern Europe suggest that there was a considerable range in the substance and reliability of what they communicated. A number of factors explain this. The person of the resident was important: was it an individual of some social status,
The Muscovite government in fact had some experience regarding the value of having a long-term resident in another capital. Starting well back in the sixteenth century, there had been regular representation at the court of the Crimean Khan.11 The real limitation there was not so much the acquisition of intelligence, since well-placed bribes generally produced inside information from amongst the Tatar elite, and there were ample opportunities to quiz merchants and others arriving from the Ottoman Empire. Rather, there was always
Certainly by the 1640s, the Muscovite government must have understood the value of having a long-term resident at least in neighbouring European territories. For more than half a year in 1643â1644, a Rigan writing under the nom de plume of Justus Filimonatus was sending reports from Riga and Danzig, though it seems he was unable to persuade the Muscovite authorities to hire him on an extended basis.13 For several months in 1649, a Russian embassy to Sweden sent back to Moscow translations of German newspapers received in Stockholm.14 The example of the Swedish residents in Moscow who, at least from the 1650s, were sending regular reports to their government, surely was not lost on the Kremlin, and in fact around 1660, the Muscovite government on at least two occasions tried (unsuccessfully) to arrange to be supplied on a regular basis with foreign news from abroad, by hiring correspondents if not by actually stationing its own representatives in another capital. The establishment of the Muscovite foreign post on a regular basis in 1665, connecting to Riga, ensured the regular delivery of newspapers and newsletters, which, however, were no substitute for having an agent on the ground who could ferret out confidential information.15
The first appointment of a Russian resident at a European court followed on the Truce of Andrusovo in 1667. It provided for an exchange of Russian and
Tiapkinâs assignment was a challenging one, given the fact that within Poland-Lithuania, there were so many competing political factions and he arrived during the interregnum following the death of King MichaÅ WiÅnowiecki. In the first instance, Tiapkinâs source of information was the Lithuanian Chancellor Hetman Krzysztof Pac. Information channelled through the Lithuanian magnates would continue to be of central importance for subsequent Muscovite news coming out of its neighbour to the West. When Tiapkin presented his credentials, his demands as to how he was to be treated show that the Posolâskii prikaz understood what a resident diplomat should be authorised to do if he was to be a source of reliable information. Those demands, to all of which Pac agreed, included free access to the king and the Rada, unhindered access to any other foreign diplomats, and permission to send couriers back to Moscow and to obtain news sent to the Polish chancery of foreign affairs from other states. As Tiapkin put it, these were the same privileges held by the Polish resident then already in Moscow. We know that Pac in fact frequently sent one of his secretaries to Tiapkin with requests or information, and arranged meetings with him. Naturally, this Lithuanian connection had the potential to bias considerably the information Tiapkin might obtain, both with regard to the upcoming election of the king and once Jan Sobieski had been selected. There
It was important for the resident to stay close to the court, which in Sobieskiâs case might mean his campaign headquarters. Tiapkin had mixed success in obtaining permission to follow the monarch, who never stopped long in one place. Yet even when permitted, for Tiapkin to be able to travel as he deemed necessary and to be able to present himself in a manner befitting the representative of the tsar required money. Like so many of the English representatives abroad, he would complain about not being given sufficient funds and not having the personal financial resources to make up the difference. In one plea for better support, he told his bosses in Moscow that he needed a portrait of the tsar to hang in the room where he might receive visitors, since, after all, the other foreign representatives in Poland all had in their chambers portraits of their royal masters. In general Tiapkin was diligent in defending the honour of his government and had a clear idea of his own status: at one point he refused to interpret the words of a courier from Moscow for Prince Radziwill, insisting that he (Tiapkin) was an accredited diplomat and not a mere translator.
Since the acculturation of the Muscovite elite is relevant to any study of Muscovite foreign relations, it is worth noting that Tiapkinâs son was with him in Poland and was permitted (by special dispensation from the king) to attend schools there, where he acquired a decent knowledge of Latin and Polish. At the point when the young Tiapkin was about to be sent off as a courier to Moscow, his father asked that he be granted a special farewell audience with the king, at which the young man delivered a prepared speech in those languages.
Tiapkin wrote regularly to Moscow, at least weekly by the post, but sometimes using additional couriers. Judging from what Popovâs monograph tells us, much of the correspondence seems to have been in cipher, though how secure it was is something we still might want to determine. Tiapkin reported on meetings of the national sejm as well as on meetings of the regional ones, provided verbatim accounts of his conversations with various officials and the king, and even recounted what purported to be private arguments between the king and his French queen regarding foreign policy matters. Often the news was labelled as rumour, although it is not always clear whether that was Tiapkinâs designation or Popovâs in writing about the residentâs reports. Until more of the Muscovite diplomatic files have been published, it is impossible to establish the impact of Tiapkinâs reports in Moscow. However, one may hypothesise that for the making of Muscovite military strategy, news arriving from Ukraine regarding the realities of Turkish, Tatar and Cossack affairs would have been more important than much of the information concerning the political squabbles in Poland.
Toward the end of his stay, when relations with Poland were strained because the Poles had signed a peace with the Turks and resented the fact that Muscovy had failed to send military support when it had been most needed, Tiapkin began to wonder whether it was possible to discern the truth in anything he was told. He was forbidden to travel to the court and required to stay in Warsaw, even if the main activity of government was being carried on elsewhere. Tiapkin blamed his inability to obtain good intelligence on the failure of Moscow to send Russian news which then could be traded and could be used to counter false reports being spread in Poland regarding Muscovite affairs. Earlier, when he had been receiving news regularly, he had even been able to impress Sobieski by telling him information from Ukraine which the king had not yet heard. In other words, here we have a situation analogous to that of Thomas Thynne, the English representative in Stockholm, whose effectiveness was compromised by his inability to obtain from London English news to trade for intelligence.
For the period following Tiapkinâs residency, we now have an excellent monograph by Kirill Kochegarov covering the negotiations between Poland and Muscovy in the early 1680s which resulted in the signing of the âPermanent Peaceâ in 1686.17 Kochegarov has mined both published and archival sources and includes a range of detailed information on how the acquisition of news
Beginning in 1680 and continuing right through to the signing of the Permanent Peace in 1686, as Kochegarov puts it, âa special agent of the Posolâskii prikaz in Smolensk, Nazarii Mikhailov syn Kraevskii, was sending the most valuable and detailed information to Moscowâ.18 Kraevskii was from an old Smolensk noble family. A convert to Orthodoxy, he entered Muscovite service in the 1650s, was involved in the Andrusovo negotiations and in subsequent border adjudication. Interestingly, he never seems to have mastered Cyrillic; his intelligence reports to Moscow were in a kind of heavily Polonised Russian written in the Latin alphabet. The significance attached to them can be seen from the fact that his letters always were addressed directly to the head of the Posolâskii prikaz. Starting in 1682, his correspondent in Moscow was Vasilii Golitsyn, the influential favourite of the regent Tsarevna Sofiia Alekseevna. Kraevskiiâs reports were deemed so secret that the Smolensk military governors were given explicit instructions to forward them sealed to Moscow and not open them. On several occasions Kraevskii travelled to Moscow for direct consultations; in other instances, he crossed the border into Poland-Lithuania for clandestine meetings with his contacts there.
Some of what Kraevskii was forwarding to Moscow were the typical avvisi which circulated widely in Poland and to a fair degree replicated material coming in via the normal news channels that served as the sources for the kuranty translations. However, what made Kraevskiiâs reporting so significant was his close relationship with Augustin Konstantynowicz, an important administrative secretary (his title was pisarâ grodskii mstislavskii), who for many years was a close confidant and functionary for the Trock commandant MichaÅ Oginski. Konstantynowicz had earlier, in 1674, been sent to Moscow by the Lithuanian magnates who were trying to negotiate the candidacy of Tsarevich Fedor Alekseevich for the Polish throne. The Lithuanian connection, and Konstantynowiczâs position as a privileged insider, then meant that a substantial amount of confidential information was being passed on to Moscow on a regular basis in the 1680s. Information transmitted through this channel moved in both directions. The Lithuanian side was also able to obtain confidential reports out of Moscow. While the specific content of individual dispatches might be known only to those privileged to be in the loop, the existence of this exchange was a badly kept secret. Both in Moscow and
The Kraevskii-Konstantynowicz connection did, however, facilitate the secret negotiations the Lithuanian magnates, Hetman MichaÅ Pac and Oginski, were carrying on with Moscow outside the framework of formal Polish-Muscovite diplomacy. For security reasons, they would insist that the originals of their letters not be sent on to Moscow, but only copies of them made by Kraevskii. As Kochegarov makes clear, the Lithuanian connection did mean that the ânewsâ being sent on to Moscow had a distinct and in some cases misleading bias. Given their ingrained hostility to Sobieski, whom they tarred with the accusation of his being too pro-French, Pac and Oginski were able at the very least to heighten suspicion in Moscow regarding Polish intentions. Pac and Oginski were quick to send on to Moscow information about Polish diplomatic missions to the Turks. Could the kingâs profession of his serious commitment to fighting the Turks really be trusted, or was he not rather planning to turn his forces against Muscovy? Since there no longer was a Russian resident in Warsaw in this period, the Posolâskii prikaz was limited in its ability to learn first-hand about the realities of Polish political intrigues and lacked the direct access Tiapkin had earlier had to the king.
Quite apart from the specific contribution of the Kraevskii-Konstantynowicz conduit, clearly other channels made it possible for each side to obtain important information which was not being readily communicated officially by either government. An example is the text of treaties. Moscow had pressed the Poles for the text of the Polish-Turkish treaty of Zhuravno signed in 1676, which the Poles refused to provide; therefore a copy was obtained by other means, even though the Posolâskii prikaz could not be certain of its authenticity. Similarly, the Poles wanted a copy of the Bahçe-Sarai treaty of 1681 ending at least temporarily the Muscovite war against the Turks and Tatars. A Russian embassy to Poland claimed it did not know the terms of the treaty, yet a copy of it had already been obtained in Poland. What we see then in a lot of the diplomatic sparring in this period is deliberate obstructionism with reference to information that was not being officially shared, even if in fact the contending parties already knew it in detail. Well before one important Polish embassy
Apart from the intelligence communicated through diplomatic channels, the Kremlin had another significant source of political intelligence: reports (otpiski) sent to Moscow by its military governors (voevody) appointed to border posts.19 In his analysis of reports from Ukraine sent to the Razriadnyi prikaz (the office which supervised the voevody), Nikolai Ohloblin showed that information deemed of particular relevance to other jurisdictions â for example, the Posolâskii or Malorossiiskii prikazy (Office of Ukrainian Affairs) â would be passed on to them. These reports, and the mechanisms by which the intelligence in them was obtained, are clearly hugely important for any study of the information level of the court and the Posolâskii prikaz. A primary duty for voevody stationed near the borders was to keep a close eye on events in the neighbouring countries which might have a direct bearing on Muscovyâs foreign relations. Ohloblin offered a tentative ranking of the reliability of the information obtained by the voevody from different sources. At the top of his list was what merchants related, followed in descending order of reliability by reports from former captives, reports by spies, and those from vykhodtsy, individuals who might arrive in suspicious or unclear circumstances. Interrogations of those who were not going beyond Kiev and presumably had an obligation to return whence they came were recorded by the Kievan officials and ultimately forwarded to Moscow. Interrogations of escaped captives or those hoping to proceed to Moscow or gain some favour in Muscovite service were recorded locally, but the individuals then sent on to be interrogated once again when they had arrived in the Russian capital. The second interrogations generally were more thorough and often revealed details not in the preliminary ones or even contradicted some of what had earlier been recorded. Here are two examples which will illustrate the importance of the voevodskie otpiski and the complexities of analyzing intelligence obtained at Muscovyâs borders.
In the late 1660s and early 1670s, a rebellion led by the Cossack Stepan Razin challenged the survival of the Muscovite state. While in its initial phases the disturbances on the lower Volga and into the Caspian Sea seemed little different from earlier incidents of Cossack piracy, the movement grew rapidly, and in 1670 the rebels were capturing important Russian towns and even seemed to be threatening to move on Moscow itself. This was not merely an internal Muscovite affair, as it affected relations with Persia, and the home territory of Razinâs Don River Cossacks was in fact beyond Muscovyâs southern border and in proximity to the territories of the Crimean Tatars and their Ottoman suzerains. As the rebellion spread, the urgency of obtaining information about it grew. An analysis of the published reports from the border commanders illustrates well the ways in which information was obtained and transmitted, much of it coming from merchants, one-time captives of the rebels, and agents sent into rebel-held territory.20 What was initially vague and conflicting rumour gave way to verifiable reporting, and that in turn provided an explicit justification for policy decisions. Moreover, the Posolâskii prikaz seems to have been charged with assembling a history of the rebellion from several years of reports, in order that it then could be used to counter wild rumours about the imminent collapse of Muscovy which were fodder for Western newspaper reports. The Kremlin had a particular sensibility to any Western reporting that seemed to impugn the dignity of the tsar or suggest weakness of the Muscovite state.
My second example is from the mid-1680s and relates to intelligence-gathering in Kiev, as recorded in the remarkable diary of the Scottish mercenary Patrick Gordon.21 Gordon arguably was the most accomplished of all the mercenaries to enter Muscovite service. He had played a key role in the heroic,
Since Muscovite borders in the south generally were not closed, there was a lot of coming and going, in the first instance by merchants, but also by clerics, messengers and others. In Gordonâs phrasing, information arrived via âa Kyovish burgesse comeing from Nemerowâ, from âa Jew came from Byally Czerkiewâ, âa merchant come from Russe Lembergâ (that is, Lâviv), âfrom people come out of Pollandâ, from âmen come from the Bania with saltâ and so on. Clerics were an important source, their news sometimes obtained when Gordon visited a local monastery. A priest who apparently had seen the encounter provided one of the most detailed and perceptive reports about a key battle fought by the Poles against the Turks and Tatars.
Another important source of information arriving on a regular basis in Kiev was the voevodaâs correspondence with other military officers and with Cossack leaders. Local troop deployments or instructions for the immediate strengthening of defensive works might be spurred by the receipt of such information, although normally any kind of major commitment of forces had to wait until the matter was cleared in Moscow, something that might well take a month or more. The exchanges with the Cossack leaders â in particular the Hetman of the Left Bank Cossacks, at this time Ivan Samoilovich â were very important. Samoilovich, of course, was also writing directly to Moscow, and clearly was concerned first and foremost with pushing Muscovite policies in ways that would benefit his own power. Even though Gordon was subordinate to the Kievan voevoda, the Scot also had his contacts in the Hetmanâs capital at Baturin. His correspondents there included both Samoilovich and his then chief lieutenant and eventual successor, Ivan Mazepa. Often it seems that the Cossack reports contained the most up-to-date information about the movements of the Crimean Tatars or efforts by the Poles to send spies or agitators across the borders to persuade Cossacks to go over to the Polish side.
The voevody were by no means simply passive recipients of information but were also proactive in acquiring it. On a number of occasions Gordon reported the results of military scouting expeditions outside of Muscovite-controlled territory. Of even greater interest is the fact that agents (spies) were sent to
Another of these intelligence agents was Mikhail Suslov, âwhom wee had sent to Polland & Germany and went from hence the first of May last [1684]â, returning to Kiev on 1 January 1685, a day before Varilov. On 4 January, Gordon summarised Suslovâs rambling account of events in the Turkish wars far to the West, concluding with a note about rumours he heard on his way back through Poland about possible plans there to turn against Muscovy. One gets the sense that Suslov tended to exaggerate, an impression reinforced on the next day, when Gordon reported, âIt was resolved to methodize & epitomize Susluws newes & send them to Mosko by postâ. Yet later in the year, after more of Suslovâs intelligence reports had been confirmed from other sources, Gordon would write of him: âSusluf being a good bairne, as bringing good wares for their money, was dispatched againe for moreâ.
Where such reports dealt mainly with the more distant wars against the Turks, the information probably would have been old by the time it reached Moscow. Arguably Varilovâs detailed and fresh information from Poland, whether or not it was accurate, should have been of great interest in the Kremlin, as it might have really been news.
These examples and my earlier discussion should convey a sense of how widely we must cast our nets if we are to gain a full appreciation of the richness and value of the foreign news coming into Muscovy from so many different directions by the last decades of the seventeenth century. To compare Muscovy and the West, as we are wont to do, is at best a risky enterprise, for it is all too easy to reach simplistic conclusions about the progress of those slippery processes we term âmodernisationâ or âwesternisationâ. When I first began to work on this material several decades ago, I tended to side with Rasmussenâs scepticism and question Alpatovâs optimism about how well the Posolâskii prikaz was informed. Now I would want to take a much more nuanced approach and would venture that at least by the last decades of the seventeenth century, the Muscovite government had come a long way in connecting itself to the state-of-the-art means of obtaining foreign news that was to be found almost everywhere in Europe. Yet foreign news seems to have been of little consequence in Russia beyond narrow circles of the elite.
Knud Rasmussen, âOn the Information Level of the Muscovite Posolâskij prikaz in the Sixteenth Centuryâ, Forschungen zur osteuropäischen Geschichte, 24 (1978), pp. 88â99; Mikhail A. Alpatov, âChto znal Posolâskii prikaz o Zapadnoi Evrope vo vtoroi polovine xvii v.?â, in Istoriia i istoriki. Istoriografiia vseobshchei istorii. Sbornik statei (Moscow: Nauka, 1966), pp. 89â129, reprinted in his Russkaia istoricheskaia myslâ i Zapadnaia Evropa xiiâxvii vv. (Moscow: Nauka, 1973), pp. 323â363. The author gratefully acknowledges financial support which made possible part of this research from the Riksbankens jubileumsfond / The Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation in conjunction with the project âCross-Cultural Exchange in Early Modern Europeâ, RFP12-0055:1, and from a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (RZ-1635-13): âThe Russian Court Theater in the late 17th Century and its Context in Trans-National Information Exchangeâ. Any views, findings, or conclusions expressed in this article do not necessarily represent those of the funding organisations.
Elena I. Kobzareva, Izvestiia o sobytiiakh v Zapadnoi Evrope v dokumentakh Posolâskogo prikaza xvii veka (Unpublished diss., Moscow, 1988).
On the processes by which the stateinye spiski were created, see Aleksei A. Novoselâskii, âRaznovidnosti krymskikh stateinykh spiskov xvii v. i priemy ikh sostavleniiaâ, Problemy istochnikovedeniia, 9 (1961), pp. 182â194. Such reporting by returning ambassadors was normal procedure in other countries. See, for example, Phyllis S. Lachs, The Diplomatic Corps under Charles ii and James ii (New Brunswick, nj: Rutgers University Press, 1965), pp. 42â45. For an overview of the history of the kuranty, see Daniel C. Waugh and Ingrid Maier, âMuscovy and the European Information Revolution: Creating the Mechanisms for Obtaining Foreign Newsâ, in Simon Franklin and Katherine Bowers (eds.), Information and Empire: Mechanisms of Communication in Russia, 1600â1850 (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2017), pp. 77â112. See also the monograph-length introduction by Ingrid Maier in the most recent volume of the ongoing series publishing the kuranty and their sources, Ingrid Maier (ed.), Vesti-kuranty 1656 g., 1660â1662 gg., 1664â1670 gg. Ch. 2. Inostrannye originaly k russkim tekstam (Moscow: Iazyki slavianskikh kulâtur, 2008), and Stepan M. Shamin, Kuranty xvii stoletiia. Evropeiskaia pressa v Rossii i vozniknovenie russkoi periodicheskoi pechati (Moscow and St. Petersburg: Alâians-Arkheo, 2011).
The key figure in the making of Muscovite foreign policy in the 1660s, Afanasii Lavrentâevich Ordin-Nashchokin, was one of the best informed men of his time; yet his insistence on pursuing policies that were at odds with political realities ultimately compromised his goals. See Boris N. Floria, Vneshnepoliticheskaia programma A.L. Ordina-Nashchokina i popytki ee osushchestvleniia (Moscow: indrik, 2013).
See Hans Cools, Marika Keblusek, and Badeloch Noldus (eds.), Your Humble Servant: Agents in Early Modern Europe (Hilversum: Uitgeverij Verloren, 2006). Stepan Shamin (e-mail 25 July 2017) has reminded me that, beyond my few examples in what follows, there is a great deal more to be said about Russian efforts to create a network of agents in Europe in the seventeenth century.
Vera G. Chentsova, Ikona Iverskoi Bogomateri (Ocherki istorii otnoshenii grecheskoi tserkvi s Rossiei v seredine xvii v. po dokumentam rgada) (Moscow: indrik, 2010). Chentsova here and in other publications and Shamin (e-mail 25 July 2017) also emphasise how important the Greek Orthodox were in the Balkans as a source of reliable information about the Ottoman Empire.
Aleksandr N. Popov, Russkoe posolâstvo v Polâshe v 1673â1677 godakh. Neskolâko let iz istorii otnoshenii drevnei Rossii k evropeiskim derzhavam (St. Petersburg: Tip. Morskogo kadetskogo korpusa, 1854), Chapter 12.
The locus classicus for any discussion of the rise and importance of permanent diplomatic representation is still Garrett Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971; 1st ed. 1954), but it was rare that any European powerâs representatives abroad could match the achievements in the level of knowledge and ability to report it regularly that was attained by the Venetian baili even as early as the late fifteenth century. For Habsburg diplomatic intelligence, see Charles Howard Carter, The Secret Diplomacy of the Habsburgs, 1598â1625 (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1964), esp. Pts. 3â4. On the intelligence gathering and communications concerns of seventeenth-century English diplomatic personnel, see Lachs, The Diplomatic Corps, esp. pp. 30â46.
Thynneâs letters are in National Archives (London), sp 95/6. State Papers Foreign, Sweden, 1665â1668. See esp. fols. 143â144v, Thynne to Williamson, 20 February 1666; fols. 145â146v, Thynne to Williamson, 27 February 1666. Williamsonâs intelligence network, one of the best in any state at the time, has been analysed by Peter Fraser, The Intelligence of the Secretaries of State & Their Monopoly of Licensed News 1660â1688 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956), esp. Chapters 3â5.
For Wycheâs reports, National Archives (London), sp 82/16, State Papers Foreign, Hamburg and Hanse Towns, 1678â1686, beginning on fol. 100 with Wyche to Joseph Williamson, 17 December 1678. Of particular interest for his review of his sources and their reliability is fol. 218, Wyche to Secretary of State Sir Lionell Jenkins, 15 October 1680.
See Aleksei V. Vinogradov, Russko-krymskie otnosheniia 50-e â vtoraia polovina 70-kh godov xvi veka (2 vols., Moscow: Institut rossiiskoi istorii ran, 2007).
In addition to the evidence in Vinogradovâs focused study, this is apparent in the more general but dated treatment of Russo-Ottoman relations by Nikolai A. Smirnov, Rossiia i Turtsiia v xviâxvii vv. (2 vols., Moscow: Moskovskii universitet, 1946).
For his reports, see N.I. Tarabasova et al. (eds.), Vesti-kuranty 1642â1644 gg. (Moscow: Nauka, 1976), pp. 40â43, 54â55, 59â74, 76â80, 83â84, 97â103, 109â113, 126, 131â138, 146â147, 167â172, 178â183.
See the discussion by Ingrid Maier, âNewspaper Translations in Seventeenth-Century Muscovy. About the Sources, Topics and Periodicity of Kuranty âMade in Stockholmâ (1649)â, in Per Ambrosiani (ed.), Explorare necesse est. Hyllningsskrift till Barbro Nilsson (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 2002), pp. 181â190.
On the establishment and functioning of the Muscovite foreign post, see Daniel C. Waugh, âIstoki sozdaniia mezhdunarodnoi pochtovoi sluzhby Moskovskogo gosudarstva v evropeiskom konteksteâ, Ocherki feodalânoi Rossii, vyp. 19 (2017), pp. 394â442. The classic and still valuable study by Ivan P. Kozlovskii, Pervye pochty i pervye pochtmeistery v Moskovskom gosudarstve (2 vols., Warsaw: Tip. Varshavskogo uchebnogo okruga, 1913), publishes many of the relevant documents.
Popov, Russkoe posolâstvo.
Kirill A. Kochegarov, Rechâ Pospolitaia i Rossiia v 1680â1686 godakh. Zakliuchenie dogovora o Vechnom mire (Moscow: indrik, 2008). My discussion on the following several pages is based on Kochegarovâs book.
Ibid., passim; here, p. 50.
See the seminal article by Nikolai Ogloblin (Ohloblin), âVoevodskie âvestovye otpiskiâ xvii v. kak material dlia istorii Malorossiiâ, Kievskaia starina, 12 (1885), pp. 365â416.
For the Razin rebellion, see E.A. Shvetsova, et al. (eds.), Krestâianskaia voina pod predvoditelâstvom Stepana Razina. Sbornik dokumentov (4 vols., Moscow: Izdatelâstvo Akademii nauk sssr, 1954â1976). I have analysed a portion of these reports in Daniel C. Waugh, âWhat Was News and How Was It Communicated in Pre-Modern Russia?â, in Simon Franklin and Katherine Bowers (eds.), Information and Empire: Mechanisms of Communication in Russia, 1600â1850 (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2017), pp. 213â252 (esp. pp. 236â250). See also in that same volume, Ingrid Maier, âHow Was Western Europe Informed about Muscovy? The Razin Rebellion in Focusâ, pp. 113â151.
The following material is based on Daniel C. Waugh, âThe Best Connected Man in Muscovy? Patrick Gordonâs Evidence Regarding Communications in Muscovy in the 17th Centuryâ, Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies, 7:2 (2014 [2015]), pp. 61â124 (here esp. pp. 114â121). The relevant volume of Gordonâs diary is Dmitry Fedosov (ed.), Diary of General Patrick Gordon of Auchleuchries 1635â1699, Vol. iv: 1684â1689, (Aberdeen: University of Aberdeen Press, 2013). In the following section, references are made to the dates of the diary entries rather than the pages of the edition.
I have in mind here the interesting comparative results obtained by the economic historian Alexander Gerschenkron and embodied in his book Europe in the Russian Mirror: Four Lectures in Economic History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970). The Russian example led him to reassess conventional wisdom about âeconomic backwardnessâ and the role of the state in overcoming it elsewhere in Europe.