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A Report on Working in the Arkhiv Vneshnei Politiki Rossii
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 May 2017
Extract
In the summer of 1986, I spent a month working very successfully in the archives of the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Istoriko-diplomaticheskoe upravlenie, Ministerstvo inostrannykh del), and both the relative rarity of the experience and the significance of the materials preserved there warrant a brief report. Arkhiv vneshnei politiki Rossii (AVPR) is administered by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, unlike the records of all other prcrevolutionary ministries, which are held by state archives under Glavnoe arkhivnoe upravlenie pri Sovctc ministrov SSSR.
I was doing research on the Greek project of Catherine II, the notorious scheme whereby she planned to share with Joseph II the partition of the Ottoman Empire and perhaps to reestablish the old Greek or East Roman Empire under her grandson Constantine. The materials I read consisted primarily of St. Petersburg's diplomatic correspondence with Paris, Vienna, and Constantinople during the 1780s. I had prepared for the research in Moscow by working in the analogous correspondence of the Archives du Ministére des Affaires étrangéres (Quai d'Orsay) in Paris and the Haus-, Hof-, und Staatsarchiv in Vienna during preceding summers. In Moscow, I was given a generous abundance of material to read, including twenty-nine volumes of the correspondence with Paris, thirty-three volumes of correspondence with Vienna, and eight volumes of correspondence with Constantinople. Much of the material was invaluable, and some of it was entirely new to historical research. The quality of the information, however, was far from uniformly distributed.
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- Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1989
References
1. For a history and description of the archive, see Grimsted, Patricia K., Archives and Manuscript Repositories in the USSR: Moscow and Leningrad (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972), 249–255 Google Scholar. I am indebted to the author for her comments on this article. See also her Supplement (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981), 82–83. For access requirements, see “Regulations Governing the Work of Foreign Researchers in the Reading-Room of the Archives of Foreign Policy of Russia of the Historical-Diplomatic Department of the USSR Ministry of Foreign Affairs,” American Historical Association Newsletter 15 (October 1977): 11–12.
2. Tsentral'nyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv drevnikh aktov: putevoditel’ (Moscow: Glavnoe archivnoe upravlenie, 1946); Bantysh-Kamenskii, N. N., Obzor vneshnikh snoshenii Rossii (po 1800 god), 4 vols. (Moscow: Lissner i Roman, 1894–1902)Google Scholar; and Golitsyn, N. V., Archiv Konstantinopol'skogo posol'stva v Moskovskom glavnom arkhive Ministerstva inostrannykh del (Moscow: Lissner i Geshel, 1900)Google Scholar.
3. See Grimsted, Archives and Manuscript Depositories, 254–255, and Supplement, 83.
4. George Kennan has shared with me his experience of AVPR while working some years ago on his book The Fateful Alliance: France, Russia, and the Coming of the First World War (New York: Pantheon, 1984). He, too, complained of the lack of a catalog, and he sometimes found it useful to order individual documents that had been cited by Soviet historians working ahead of him.
5. For a full account, see my article “Evaluating the Traditions of Russian Aggression: Catherine II and the Greek Project,” Slavonic and East European Review 66 (January 1988): 91–117.