The British Embassy in St Petersburg

Abstract

By the beginning of the twentieth century, the British Embassy in St Petersburg ranked third or fourth in status among British embassies behind Paris, Berlin and perhaps Vienna. While the prospect of the harsh climate and the high cost of living worried some British diplomats, most of them treated a posting to the Tsarist Empire as an opportunity to gain valuable experience. This had not always been the case. In Elizabethan and Stuart times, English ambassadors sent to Muscovy often felt they were being exiled to a ‘rude and barbarous’ kingdom, where a boorish and uncivilised people were ruled over by a savage despot.¹ During the eighteenth century, the heroic attempts by Peter the Great and his successors to westernise Russia were viewed with admiration and awe by British diplomats posted to St Petersburg, but most of them remained convinced that little was changing beneath the ornate surface of life. When Catherine the Great ruled the country, one British ambassador derided the idea that the Russian aristocracy had really imbibed the Enlightenment culture so extravagantly propounded by the Empress, noting caustically that ‘a slight though brilliant varnish’ could not conceal ‘illiterate and unformed minds’.²