Accusations of Russian meddling in American domestic affairs. Russian denials. Disinformation and manipulation of the American media. Sanctions against prominent Russians. Stories of corruption and cover-up. Mutual mistrust. The year is 1871, and the American government has just asked the Russian government to recall Constantin Gavrilovich Catacazy, its minister to Washington, 1869–1871. A descendant of Greeks who had fled the Ottoman empire in the eighteenth century, Catacazy in his brief tour as minister managed to alienate President Ulysses Grant and Secretary of State Hamilton Fish, whose good offices Catacazy needed to represent Russian interests in Washington. Catacazy tried to drive a wedge between the United States and Great Britain, made his grievances public in the American press, accused President Grant of potentially benefitting from a claim against the Russian government for breaking an agreement with a private American citizen to provide arms during the Crimean War, and was a gossip monger. His testy relationship with Fish prompted Fish to call him a “first-class scamp” (93). According to Lee Farrow, Catacazy had more detractors than sympathizers (90), even in St. Petersburg. Moreover, his wife's alleged “past,” an adulterous affair with Catacazy long before he became minister to the United States, caused her to be ostracized by the Washington “arbiters of etiquette” (66), thus hobbling the couple's efforts to become a presence in Washington polite society.
Farrow's book will no doubt be the definitive study of the diplomatic imbroglio caused by Catacazy, about whom it may be said, as Winston Churchill remarked of John Foster Dulles, that he was a bull who brought his own china shop with him. Farrow suggests that her study demonstrates the importance of the individual in diplomacy. This is accentuated by her use of diplomatic correspondence in Russian and American archives and, even more so, by her extensive use of stories, many of them gossipy, from newspapers all over the United States. At the same time, her study raises an important question of when and how is it appropriate for one country to request the recall of another country's diplomatic representative. Given Farrow's emphasis on the importance of the individual, it may not be possible to settle this question except on a case-by-case basis.
Farrow's thesis that the Catacazy affair was “the beginning of the slow decline in Russian-American relations from friend to foe” (142) is not convincing. To do so would require greater contextualization than Farrow provides. She ignores many other studies of American-Russian relations in mid-nineteenth century—economic, cultural, and military relations, as well as technology transfer. Not only did the visit in 1871–72 of Grand Duke Alexis proceed successfully, but Russian displays were prominent at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia; American firearms and production technology aided the modernization of the Russian Army under Minister of War Dmitrii Miliutin; Americans provided significant famine relief in 1891–92; and the commercial treaty of 1832 remained in force until 1911. To be sure, toward the end of the century, George Kennan's articles on Siberia and the exile system, published in the 1880s in Century magazine, transformed the Russian government in the American imagination into a model of despotism. Young Russian revolutionaries persecuted by the government aroused American sympathy (though this was often countered by American antipathy to political assassination). In the 1880s pogroms darkened the image of Russia; in addition, naturalized American Jews born in the Russian empire found discriminatory practices when they returned. But, until then, the diplomatic china broken by the bullish Catacazy was seemingly repaired.
