Russian Diplomat Aleksandr Nikolaevich Svechin

The name of Aleksandr Nikolaevich Svechin (1859—1936), an employee of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Empire, is associated with important milestones of Russia’s bilateral relations with Italy, Turkey, France, but first of all with the Netherlands, where he was in the diplomatic service during the First World War. Up to date no studies were devoted to A. N. Svechin in either Russian or foreign historiography. The aim of this study is to make a scientific reconstruction of his biography. The basis of this article is archival records, genealogies, “Yearbooks of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs” published in 1861—1916, which contains data concerning the activities of Russian diplomacy and the staff of the department, collections of documents, the Dutch press of 1912—1922, “Lists of civilian ranks” and other reference books, as well as Internet resources. These sources made it possible to draw up a biography of A. N. Svechin, to provide information about his closest relatives, to trace the stages of Svechin’s promotion from the junior diplomatic post of attaché and the lowest civil rank of collegiate registrar to the appointment of state councillor in deed Svechin in 1912 as Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to the Kingdom of the Netherlands and his service as the head of the Russian diplomatic mission in The Hague until the end of his career in 1918

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