In the seventeenth century, one of Russia's most important relations with other countries was with the Dutch Republic. Primarily this was a commercial relationship, since the Dutch became the largest trading partner with Russia at the end of the sixteenth century and remained so until Peter's time. Political relations were not trivial, though much less important than Russia's involvement with its immediate neighbors, Poland, Crimea, Sweden, and even Denmark. Kees Boterbloem has done historians of early modern Russia a serious service in providing a swift overview of all the main events and issues in this period of a hundred and sixty years.
The book is in part a continuation of the unfinished work of Jordan E. Kurland, who tried to grapple with the Dutch embassy of 1664–65 but never managed to finish the work. Boterbloem's survey is exactly that, based mostly on published sources and secondary literature, with some archival supplements for the later years of the seventeenth century. The reader senses some disappointment on the part of the author that the political relationship did not develop, but he is right to explain this is in the simple fact that both the Dutch Republic and Russia had more pressing issues to confront. They were also not always on the same side in the Baltic, for the Netherlands tended to favor Sweden over Denmark. Boterbloem perhaps exaggerates somewhat the bad relations between Russia and Sweden. After the Stolbovo treaty, Russia and Sweden got along quite well for decades and Sweden even had the first permanent representative in Moscow whose reports still rest in the Swedish archives. The war of 1656–61 did not produce permanent estrangement, and again relations were good until August II of Poland persuaded Peter to join him in attacking Sweden. More fundamentally, the Dutch republic's interests were in western Europe, Asia, and the New World, while Russia was mainly preoccupied with its neighbors. The result was that most of the embassies were not very successful, even on commercial matters, but the surviving records of the interactions have a great deal of interest.
Dutch economic historians have done useful work in recent decades in uncovering the networks of Dutch merchants in Russia but also in northern Europe generally. Many of these families were effectively international. Boterbloem successfully integrates their findings to provide a more lively and more nuanced portrait of the Dutch merchants and entrepreneurs than that found in the older literature. He also looks for cultural relationships, which he finds came mostly at the end of the seventeenth century. After the 1590's, for example, few of the tsar's doctors were Dutch in spite of the definite leading role of Dutch universities in medicine.
He is perhaps too modest about the Dutch role in Europe and the world in the later seventeenth century (104–5). The earlier decades, as he notes, were different. Jonathan Israel noted long ago that the Dutch merchants who traded at Archangel went on to establish the East India Company, perhaps the best argument for the significance of the Russia trade. The eighty-year long war of the Dutch republic against Spain did much to paralyze the hegemonic power in Europe, to the great benefit of England and France. The Dutch had no way to stop the return of France as a great power nor the rise of English commerce, but they held their own until the early eighteenth century. Occasionally his judgements on Russia history seem a little old-fashioned, such as his statement that the Russian trade goods were squeezed out of an enserfed peasantry. In fact, the peasantry of northern Russia and the Urals was not enserfed, and in any case, it is difficult to square the notion of squeezing the peasantry with the doubling of the population in the course of the seventeenth century (45–46).
None of these strictures lessen the value of the book. He provides for the Slavist reader the necessary background in the history of the Republic as well as a solid overview of the relationship between the two countries. His bibliography is particularly useful (including that in the notes to the introduction), providing references to the Dutch literature as well as to that in other western languages and Russian. He is probably right that it has become a “forgotten friendship,” and has done well to remind us of its importance.
