Among others at LSE who helped me enormously, Sue Starkey stands out. She coped with my frequent hysteria when confronted by computers, photocopiers and other technological challenges. Her colleagues in the Government Department’s General Office (Jill Stuart, Cerys Jones, Madeleine Bothe, Hiszah Tariq) also helped me and calmed me down. My colleague, Professor Janet Hartley, very kindly read the text for me and suggested changes. So too did our students, Conor Riffle and Megan Tulac. In my first twenty-four years at LSE I kept as far from the School’s management as possible. While working on this book, however, I was initially head of department and subsequently a member of LSE’s governing council. That gave me some insight into the intelligent, efficient and good-humoured manner in which the School was run by (Sir) Howard Davies, its director. Tony (Lord) Grabiner, chairman of the Board of Governors, showed not just wisdom but great unselfishness, devoting an immense amount of his time to unpaid service to the School to a degree that few members of the academic community realize.
I must also thank Professor Patrick O’Brien for his advice on war, finance and economic issues, and Alexis de Tiesenhausen for his help and advice as regards illustrations.
For the first eighteen months of my research I lived mostly off the excellent holdings of the British Library and owed much to the help of its staff. After joining the London Library halfway through my research, I discovered just how splendid a resource it is for scholars in general and historians of imperial Russia in particular.
I published an article outlining the theme and purpose of this book in
My family – Mikiko, Aleka, Max and Tolly – suffered during my research and writing of the book but helped to keep me going.
In the era covered by this book Russia ran on the Julian calendar, which in the nineteenth century was twelve days behind the Gregorian calendar used in most of the rest of Europe. The events covered by this book occurred partly in Russia and partly abroad. To avoid confusion, I have used the Gregorian – i.e. European – calendar throughout the text. Documents are cited in the notes in their original form and when they have dates from the Julian calendar the letters OS (i.e. Old Style) appear after them in brackets.
I have used a modified version of the Library of Congress system for transliterating words from Russian. To avoid bewildering anglophone readers I have not included Russian hard and soft signs, accents or stress signs in names of people and places in the text. A point to note is that the Russian
When faced with surnames of non-Russian origin I have tried – not always successfully – to render them in their original Latin version. My own name thereby emerges unscathed as Lieven rather than depressed and reduced as Liven. As regards Christian names I also transliterate for Russians but in general use Western versions for Germans, Frenchmen and other Europeans. So Alexander’s chief of staff is called Petr Volkonsky but General von der Pahlen is rendered as Peter, in deference to his Baltic German origins. No system is perfect in this respect, not least because members of the Russian elite of this era sometimes spelt their own names quite differently according to mood and to the language in which they were writing.
Where an Anglicized version of a town’s name is in common use, I have used it. So Moscow rather than Moskva burns down in this book. But other towns in the Russian Empire are usually rendered in the Russian version, unless the German or Polish version is more familiar to English readers. Towns in the Habsburg Empire and Germany are usually given their German version of a name. This is to simplify the lives of baffled readers trying to follow the movements of armies in texts and maps, though when any doubts might exist alternative versions of place names are given in brackets.
