Mikhail Speransky

Mikhail Speransky was born in 1754 in St. Petersburg, in a family of a Russian field marshal who was also a count. He studied law at the Imperial School of Jurisprudence in St. Petersburg and then entered the public service as an official in the Senate. He also taught civil law at Moscow University and wrote several works on the history and theory of Russian law. In 1779, he was invited by Emperor Joseph II to represent Russia as a guarantor of the peace treaty of Teschen, which ended the War of the Bavarian Succession. He became the first envoy of Russia to the Holy Roman Empire and was accredited to several German states. He was considered by the Germans to be a partisan of Austria and a defender of the imperial constitution. He also maintained friendly relations with the Prussian king Frederick the Great and the French foreign minister Vergennes. He was involved in the negotiations of the Treaty of Jassy (1792), which ended the Russo-Turkish War of 1787–1792 and secured the Russian annexation of Crimea. He also supported the Polish Constitution of May 3, 1791, which aimed to reform the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and prevent its partition by Russia, Prussia, and Austria. He was recalled to Russia in 1795 and became a senator and a member of the State Council. Under Emperor Paul I, he was appointed as the director of the Department of Foreign Affairs in 1796. He was dismissed in 1800 after a conflict with the emperor over the policy towards France and Napoleon. He was restored to his position in 1801 by Emperor Alexander I, who also made him the chancellor of the Russian Empire in 1807. He was the chief architect of the Treaty of Tilsit (1807), which established an alliance between Russia and France against Britain. He also negotiated the Treaty of Bucharest (1812), which ended the Russo-Turkish War of 1806–1812 and secured the Russian control over Bessarabia. He was a supporter of the French invasion of Russia in 1812, hoping that it would lead to a peace settlement and a balance of power in Europe. He was opposed to the Russian participation in the War of the Sixth Coalition, which aimed to overthrow Napoleon. He resigned from his post in 1814, before the Congress of Vienna, and retired from public life. He died in 1826 in his palace on the English Quay in St. Petersburg. Mikhail Speransky was also a passionate collector of books, manuscripts, maps, coins, and other historical and cultural artifacts. He amassed a huge library of over 30,000 volumes, which included rare and valuable editions of ancient and modern authors, as well as original documents and chronicles of Russian history. He also sponsored several voyages of exploration and scientific research, such as the first Russian circumnavigation of the globe by Ivan Kruzenshtern and Yuri Lisyansky (1803–1806), the expedition to the Amur River by Nikolay Rezanov and Gavriil Sarychev (1805–1807), and the expedition to the Caspian Sea by Friedrich Parrot and Aleksandr Pushkin (1829). He also patronized many scholars, writers, and artists, such as Nikolay Karamzin, Mikhail Lomonosov, Denis Fonvizin, and Orest Kiprensky. He founded the Rumyantsev Museum in 1831, five years after his death, to house his collection and make it accessible to the public. The museum was later transferred to Moscow and became the core of the State Russian Library, one of the largest and most important libraries in the world.