From Victory to Peace

In From Victory to Peace, Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter brings the Russian perspective to a critical moment in European political history.

This history of Russian diplomatic thought in the years after the Congress of Vienna concerns a time when Russia and Emperor Alexander I were fully integrated into European society and politics. Wirtschafter looks at how Russia's statesmen who served Alexander I across Europe, in South America, and in Constantinople represented the Russian monarch's foreign policy and sought to act in concert with the allies.

Based on archival and published sources—diplomatic communications, conference protocols, personal letters, treaty agreements, and the periodical press—this book illustrates how Russia's policymakers and diplomats responded to events on the ground as the process of implementing peace unfolded.

Thanks to generous funding from the Sustainable History Monograph Pilot and the Mellon Foundation the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access (OA) volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other Open Access repositories.

Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter is Emeritus Professor of History at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. She is author of Religion and Enlightenment in Catherinian Russia, Russia's Age of Serfdom 1649–1861, The Play of Ideas in Russian Enlightenment Theater, Social Identity in Imperial Russia, Structures of Society, and From Serf to Russian Soldier.

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, London School of Economics & Political Science, author of The Volga:

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.