From Victory to Peace: Russian Diplomacy after Napoleon

by Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter, Aleksandr Bulgakov (Translator)

Overview

From Victory to Peace: Russian Diplomacy After Napoleon explores how Russia’s diplomats understood European security as they worked to implement the edifice of pacification and peace constructed in 1814, 1815, and 1818. In response to developments across Europe and in Spanish America, Emperor Alexander I’s hopes for peace, pragmatic adaptability, and commitment to act in concert with the other great powers came fully into focus. Based on sources of Russian provenance, the book challenges characterizations of Alexander’s behavior as erratic and his foreign policy as heavy-handed and expansionist. Indeed, as historians assimilate the Russian perspective on European order (as well as the perspectives of other less well-studied countries), they encounter a multifaceted Restoration built upon practices of enlightened reformism and direct experience of revolution and war.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798887192475
Publisher:	Academic Studies Press
Publication date:	04/04/2023
Pages:	418
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.00(d)
Language:	Russian

About the Author

Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter is Emeritus Professor of History at California State Polytechnic Universityin Pomona and author of From Serf to Russian Soldier (1990); Structures of Society: Imperial Russia’s “People of Various Ranks” (1994; Russian translation, 2002); Social Identity in Imperial Russia (1997); The Play of Ideas in Russian Enlightenment Theater (2003); Russia’s Age of Serfdom, 1649-1861 (2008); Religion and Enlightenment in Catherinian Russia: The Teachings of Metropolitan Platon (2013); and From Victory to Peace: Russian Diplomacy After Napoleon (2021). Professor Wirtschafter has been a Guggenheim Fellow, Fulbright-Hays Scholar, IREX exchange participant, DAAD scholar, and visiting professor at institutions of higher learning in Moscow, Paris, and Tübingen.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Russia as a Great Power in Europe
1. Pacification and Peace (1815–17)
2. Completion of the General Alliance (1817–20)
3. Alliance Unity and Intervention in Naples (1820–21)
4. To Act in Concert (1821–22)
5. Spain and the European System (1820–23)
Conclusion: Russia's European Diplomacy

What People are Saying About This

Richard Wortman

This work is welcome, bringing intellectual history back into the understanding of a diplomatic scene and foregrounding the ideas that as Wirtschafter shows animate the major figures in the international restoration. The scholarship is broad and impeccable, comprising numerous sources from Russian and European archives as well as many published sources on the period.

Janet Hartley

Based on extensive research in Russian archives, this book makes a significant contribution to scholarship on Russian foreign relations in the period 1815–23. It fills a significant gap and helps to give a more balanced view of European diplomacy in the decade after the Napoleonic Wars.