On the characteristics of the diplomatic corps of the Russian Empire in the late 19th – early 20th Centuries

The article, based on data from the “Yearbooks of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs”, examines the structure of the personnel of Russian diplomatic missions abroad by nationality and ethnicity of employees, and also traces the dynamics of changes in this area in the late 19th - early 20th centuries. The aim of the study was to determine the place of foreigners and people from other countries in the Russian diplomatic service using statistical methods. The author concludes that although the share of foreigners in the Russian diplomatic corps was quite large, it declined in the pre-war twenty years from half in 1894 to approximately one third of the total personnel in 1914. In addition, it was established that foreigners never held leadership positions in the diplomatic hierarchy; they performed almost exclusively clerical functions, did not have access to classified documentation and, in fact, were deprived of the opportunity to exert any influence on the country’s foreign policy. The article pays special attention to diplomatic correspondence from the end of the 19th century from the archive collection “Embassy in Berlin” of the Archive of Foreign Policy of the Russian Empire, concerning the struggle around the replacement of the post of consul in Königsberg in the apparatus of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Fragments of confidential messages published for the first time illustrate and confirm statistical data that on the eve of the First World War there was an intensive process of “nationalization” of Russian diplomatic personnel, expressed in the gradual displacement of foreigners and a significant increase in the proportion of Russian officials among the staff of diplomatic institutions.