P. K. GRIMSTED. The Foreign Ministers of Alexander I (Political Attitudes and the Conduct of Russian Diplomacy 1801 - 1825). University of Kealifornia Press. Berkeley and Los Angeles. 1969. 367 pp.

The monograph by American historian Patricia Kennedy Grimstead, a research associate at the Russian Institute of Columbia University, is devoted to the political, philosophical, ethical views and psychology of Russian foreign ministers during the reign of Alexander I. In addition, the author tries to pose common problems: the correlation of objective and subjective factors in politics, the evolution of Russian diplomacy in the first quarter of the XIX century, the nature and causes of wars, the anti-Napoleonic coalition. P. K. Grimsted worked in the archives of the USSR, France, England, and Austria; she is familiar with the most important pre-revolutionary and Soviet publications, memoirs, diaries, and letters of Russian statesmen, Russian bourgeois, Soviet, and Anglo-American literature. As is customary in the West,

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the author does not give an analysis of all this literature, but is limited to describing the main sources used in the work. The book consists of separate essays on the activities of Russian diplomats of the first quarter of the XIX century (N. P. Panin, V. P. Kochubey, A. R. Vorontsov, A. Chartoriysky, A. Ya. Budberg, N. P. Rumyantsev, K. V. Nesselrode), united by a single author's concept.

P. K. Grimsted tries to justify the legitimacy and necessity of studying, first of all, the views and moods of individuals, since in the conditions of an autocratic state, it was personal participation, as she claims, that determined the direction of the political course. Alexander I, his relations with Napoleon, Metternich, and the ministers of his own country had, in her opinion, a decisive influence on state policy. "A small group of cosmopolitan diplomats" (as P. K. Grimstead calls them) were closely connected with Europe, which largely explained the cosmopolitanism in Russian foreign policy. The influence of the individual on politics also increased due to the fact that communication between States was difficult due to the lack of railways and telegraphs, and this forced diplomats to make independent decisions.

P. K. Grimsted believes that the internal tasks of the state, its national interests, and public opinion had little impact on international relations. "Foreign policy for imperial Russia," she writes, "in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, as well as at the end of the century, meant more escape from reality than the need to solve internal problems" (p. 9). The author attaches even less importance to economic factors in solving foreign policy issues, citing economic factors as the main ones. evidence of the Treaty of Tilsit in 1807, which eliminated trade with England that was profitable for the Russian state.

The preliminary conclusions contained at the beginning of the paper lead P. K. Grimsted to recognize the crucial role of diplomacy in relations between states when solving the problem of the correlation between the subjective and the objective in politics. This point of view significantly impoverishes the study. As you know, international relations in the era of the Napoleonic Wars were determined by economic, social and class reasons. All strata of Russian society and the state as a whole suffered from the continental blockade. This was one of the reasons for the fragility and fragility of the Russo - French alliance. Russian public opinion was not as passive as it seems to the author. The autocracy could not: ignore the interests and sentiments of the ruling class, which openly expressed dissatisfaction with the agreement of 1807. V. I. Lenin repeatedly pointed out that the policy of the state depends on many factors that need to be studied in totality. 1
The subjective concept did not allow P. K. Grimsted to fully understand the causes of the Patriotic War of 1812, although it recognizes the national character of Russia's struggle against Napoleonic aggression. The author considers this struggle to be the only objective factor influencing Russia's foreign policy, "because it was about protecting national security" (p. 9). But the national war, according to her, ended in December 1812. P. K. Grimsted regards the battles of 1813-1815 as a manifestation of the anti-national policy of Alexander I; in her opinion, Russia's military successes in the fight against Napoleon would not even slow down the internal development of the country (p. 56), " Even when Napoleon was expelled from Russia and the country needed everything, anything, only not in the continuation of the war, Alexander was much more interested in a grand coalition to drive his enemy out of Paris than in the restoration and development of his own war-ravaged backward power" (p. 9). The fallacy of this statement is obvious. The defeat of Napoleon's army in Russia in 1812 did not yet mean the end of the struggle against the enemy: for its complete defeat, a war on the territory of Western Europe was necessary. 2 Recently published documents from the Foreign Policy Archive prove that even after the expulsion of Napoleon's army from Russia, there was a real danger of a new invasion, which threatened the national independence of Russia and other states .3
1 See V. I. Lenin. PSS. Vol. 41, p. 65.

2 See for more details "The Liberation War of 1813 against Napoleon's rule", Moscow, 1965; P. A. Zhilin. The Death of the Napoleonic Army in Russia, Moscow, 1968.

3 "Foreign Policy of Russia", Vol. VII, Moscow, 1970.

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Only the campaigns of 1813-1815, which followed the campaign of 1812, led to the liberation of the peoples of Europe from the rule of Napoleon.

P. K. Grimsted considers Alexander I to be a rather large, but contradictory, and subject to various influences. She explains this inconsistency by the collision of his liberal views on the tasks of internal development with the desire to establish a "balance of forces" and protective principles in Europe (p.293). Assessing the foreign policy course of Alexander I, the author rightly notes that the tsar did not seek broad conquests and "was not tempted by Napoleon's promises in the eastern question"; the ideas of national solidarity were alien to him. "In his views on international relations," she writes, "Alexander was more of an eighteenth-century cosmopolitan than a nineteenth-century nationalist" (p.46).

In general, P. K. Grimsted creates a somewhat idealized image of Alexander I, calling him a liberal who switched to conservative positions only after the revolutionary actions in the 20s of the XIX century in the West and in Russia (the uprising of the Semenovsky regiment) (pp. 62-63). She believes that Alexander I advocated the restoration of the Bourbon dynasty in 1814 because the French people wanted it (p. 52). The anti-Napoleonic sentiments of the people of France, of course, played a role in resolving this issue, but they were not guided by the rulers of Europe when they put Louis XVIII on the throne. The author is silent about the counter-revolutionary nature of the Holy Alliance, portraying it as a religious organization created under the influence of the mystical sentiments of the Russian emperor, designed to unite Christian states (p. 43).

The article focuses on the views of Russian foreign ministers. The author tries to understand the reasons for the frequent change of the latter, the rapid rise and fall of a number of statesmen of the Alexander era. Here, perhaps, the subjectivism of P. K. Grimsted is most clearly manifested, linking changes in Russia's foreign policy course only with the will of individuals. Thus, she believes that N. Panin, the first Russian foreign minister of Alexander I, sought an alliance with Prussia and England only because of his reactionary beliefs (p. 72), that A. R. Vorontsov, as a result of his own Anglomanism, forced the emperor to take a course of rapprochement with Great Britain (p. 96), Similar explanations Naturally, they cannot show the true tasks and problems facing the Russian government at that time in the field of international relations. The author, for example, does not say a word about the hesitation of Alexander I and his ministers regarding rapprochement with England in 1803, which was reflected in diplomatic correspondence and expressed, in particular, by A. R. Vorontsov. 4 P. K. Grimsted has studied many documents that reflect the views of Russian diplomats on foreign policy. However, the identification of these views with the foreign policy course of Russia in the first quarter of the XIX century. and especially the periodization of diplomatic history introduced by the author "according to the Ministers of Foreign Affairs" seems to be erroneous.

P. K. Grimsted's method of research - covering historical facts and events only through the prism of the individual, assessing state policy only through the psychology and worldview of people (although they played an important role) - is far from a truly scientific explanation of the historical process. No individual, even the most prominent, is free of time, the interests of his class, the living conditions of the country, and the needs of its people.

The limitations of the method did not allow the author to solve the tasks that she set for herself. In particular, it failed to trace the evolution of Russian diplomacy in the first quarter of the 19th century. Behind the personal views of the foreign ministers, she did not see the main policy directions, which were determined primarily by a complex of objective social and economic factors. Individual chapters of the book (the third, fifth, and eighth) are characterized by fragmentary nature and weak argumentation. The author often uses secondary materials, omitting the program documents necessary for understanding the country's foreign policy as a whole. The main disadvantage of the work is the subjective idealistic concept of the author, which generates methodological errors and contradictions found in the book.

4 See "Foreign Policy of Russia", vol. I. M. 1960, p. 396.

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