Moderniser of Russia

History told through individuals’ lives has undergone a Renaissance in Russian history. This study of Andrei Andreevich Vinius (1641–1716), of Dutch heritage, who moved to Russia as a child and spent his career as an Orthodox subject in tsarist service, is a welcome addition to that genre. This monograph, the first English-language biography of Vinius, is based on published sources and secondary scholarship. Kees Boterbloem draws heavily on lesser-known studies by I.P. Kozlovskii and I.N. Iurkin, but has tried to write Vinius’ life in a more comprehensive and accessible way. Boterbloem calls Vinius ‘the idealtypus of a modernizing Russian official’ (p. 113), whose ‘liminal identity between Russianness and Dutchness allows us to ponder ... cultural cross-fertilization in a concrete manner’ (p. 8). Further, as Boterbloem aptly observes, ‘the creation of Russia’s Early Modern colonial empire bears far more investigation than it has received in the historiography’ (p. 13). With his involvement in so many areas of Russian governance, Vinius’ life serves as a wonderful entry-point into the complex and dynamic decades in which ‘Muscovy became Russia’. Boterbloem argues that Vinius was a conduit of modernisation ultimately eclipsed by the modernisation he helped to foment: a ‘multi-talented Man Friday’ who ‘belonged to a vanishing age’ (p. 233). While he is entirely persuasive on the first point, I was not convinced of the latter, although, to be fair, this is not a central argument in the monograph

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