Documents from the Foreign Policy Archives of the Russian Empire as a Historical Source for Research into Domestic Policy — Pros and Cons

Any specific historical research begins with the selection of sources, and, in our opinion, this can serve as the foundation for any kind of theorizing and generalization. It’s not necessary to always find and analyze completely new documents, previously unknown or not introduced into scientific circulation, in order to create original research. it is often possible to obtain new information from already known documents just by taking a different perspective and asking different questions. Closely related to this is the problem of analyzing the information contained in a particular document, which was, of course, not created for historians to work with, but for completely different purposes. We refer to this “new interpretation” of a long-known source when discussing the documents from the Foreign Ministry, namely dispatches, letters, and telegrams created by diplomats serving at the Russian embassy in Berlin, when writing works on the internal development of Germany in the late 19th — early 20th centuries. As part of official document circulation, diplomatic communications bear a significant imprint of the personality, experience, and professional qualities of their creators; they are created in a specific political atmosphere in their own state and in the host country; and they are one of the important sources of information in the formation of political course. All this guarantees their value for modern researchers. The author of the article concludes that the use of documents deposited in the Archive of the Foreign Policy of the Russian Empire in research on the internal development of Germany is perfectly legitimate, but it must be supplemented and verified by all types of written sources, primarily of German origin, such as legislative acts; office records (including statistics); journalistic works; memoirs, diaries, epistolaries.