Inozemtsy v Rossii XVI–XVII vv, and: Vykhodtsy iz Zapadnoi Evropy v Rossii XVII veka: Pravovoi status i real´noe polozhenie (review)

After the fall of the Soviet Union and once the ideological differences of the Cold War began to dissipate, Russian scholars began to revisit the old debate surrounding Russia’s position vis-à-vis the West. Russian historians awakened to new possibilities for exploring the historical dimensions of the future course of national development between the poles of Europe and Asia.¹ With fewer political and ideological constraints, Russian historians have been able to reexamine stereotypes and historical assumptions and to look more deeply at the status and activities of foreigners in Russia.

This burgeoning work has begun to reevaluate the character and degree of Western influence, the activities of individuals, and the role of church and state in initiating, overseeing, and shaping contact. It has also begun to take up old subjects in new ways, such as the relationship between non-Orthodox Christianity and the Orthodox church hierarchy, and the interactions between foreign immigrants and the man on the street. Of particular interest are those studies that examine how knowledge and information cross the national and cultural barriers through close contacts between foreigners and the elite Russians of society and government. The experience of integration or assimilation is also an important topic within this field of study, as historians analyze how foreigners become integrated into government service and into society. One of the important conclusions that have begun to emerge from this growing literature is that many assumptions made about the relationship between Russia and the West in the 17th century will crumble as scholars examine new data and ask new questions of the old. The works of S. P. Orlenko and T. A. Oparina represent a careful exploration of exactly how Russia and the West interconnected and interacted.

One thing of particular note in these monographs is their meticulous examination of identity. In his response to Henry L. Roberts’s essay on Russia and the West, Marc Raeff reminded us that “the starting point of any judgment of comparison or contrast is a recognition, usually tacit, of identity.”² Orlenko and Oparina recognize that there are multiple levels of identity on both sides of the dichotomy of Russia and the West, and that the intercourse between sojourning Europeans and Russian society was not cut and dried and did not always follow the accepted stereotypes of behavior. In this, they go further in their understanding than many earlier discussions; however, if they fall short in any way, it is that they do not connect their conclusions to the larger theoretical superstructure inherent in the ongoing debates on Russia and the West, the transnational acquisition of knowledge, or the reception of cultural forms across profound borders.

Scholarship on European immigrants in Russia stretches back at least as far as the mid-18th century. The combined bibliographies of Orlenko and Oparina are missing some important titles by both Western and Russian scholars,³ but by analyzing the body of work on which they base their conclusions, an interesting picture emerges of the changing character of this field of study over the last two and a half centuries. In the period before the Russian Revolution, the preoccupation of scholars studying Europeans in Russia was centered on the history of Protestant and other non-Russian Orthodox communities in Russia, as well as on discussions of religious tolerance toward and confessional freedom for European non-Orthodox Christians. After the Revolution, the interest of scholars shifted toward the study of social structures and communities; much of the work done during the Soviet period focused on the Nemetskaia sloboda (German Suburb), and the experiences of prominent families and specific nationalities. The post-Soviet period has seen an...