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A Note on Some European Foreign Office Archives and Russian Domestic History, 1790-1812

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

R. E. McGrew
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Extract

The use of foreign office materials for domestic history is by no means new, but Russian historians have done very little with this kind of research. One reason is that the Russians themselves have not needed to, and in recent years the turn toward social and intellectual history has seemed to make the diplomats' comments on court and society superficial if not irrelevant. This impression is actually erroneous, and non-Soviet scholars will find diplomatic archives a rich resource in themselves and an excellent supplement for published materials. This essay describes materials for Russian internal history from the Haus-, Hof-, und Staatsarchiv, the Archives du Ministere des Affaires Etrangeres, and the Public Record Office. The author read these archives for the period 1790-1812 looking for material on Russian reform policies to supplement information collected from published sources. The results were so gratifying that a summary of them should be of value to other scholars engaged on projects in prerevolutionary Russian domestic history.

Type
Notes and Comment
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 23 , Issue 3 , September 1964 , pp. 531 - 536
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1964

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References

1 The Seven-Year Plan is published in () (Moscow, 1958).

2 See, for example, Oleg Hoeffding, Substance and Shadow in the Soviet Seven Year Plan, Foreign Affairs, Apr., 1959, pp. 394-406, and Naum Jasny, Soviet Economy: Target for Tomorrow, Soviet Survey, Jan.-Mar., 1959, pp. 57-62.

3 (), Oct. 18, 1961, pp. 5-7.

4 Ibid., p. 5.

5 Joseph W. Willett, The Recent Record in Agricultural Production, Dimensions of Soviet Economic Power, Joint Economic Committee, Congress of the United States (Washington, D.C., 1962), p. 107.

6 (), 1961, pp. 328-29.

7 H. C. (), Dec. 16, 1963.

8 Ibid., p. 1.

9 (), p. 32.

10 Prices of new models are set so as to amortise most development and tooling costs in the first two years. The official index of cost in machinery is based only on comparable production. Machinery models are defined as comparable after they have been in production for two years, but this is precisely the point at which their high, initial costs begin to be revised downward, resulting in an index of cost which is continuously declining.

11 In the absence of precise investment data for 1962 and 1963, it is difficult to say to what extent the decline was unintended.

12 I(), Dec. 17, 1963, pp. 2-4.

13 Although United States government sources believe that Soviet official statistics overstate actual agricultural output since 1958, we use official statistics here. Relative totals are not affected unless the amount of overstatement changes. Overstatement may, in fact, be greater in years of poor harvest, especially in cases where government procurement constitutes a small share of output.

14 Where 1965 targets have not been announced, we estimate them by applying the original planned rate of growth to the 1964 target or to the 1963 total. Where the 1963 total is lower than the 1962 output, we assume that the 1965 target aimed just to recover the lost ground, so we apply two years at the planned rate of increase to the 1962 base. This procedure, of course, can give only a very rough estimate.

15 (), op. cit., p. 3.

16 (), 1962, p. 453.

17 For example, (), Feb. 26,1964, p. 1.

18 () op. cit., p. 3.

19 (), Dec. 17, 1963, pp. 4-6.