CHRISTINE HOLDEN (Gorham, ME, U.S.A) INFORMATION ABO UT BRITONS IN RUSSIA, FROM CHURCH ARCHIVES IN LONDON* London's Guildhall Library contains an archive which is a valuable resource for information on Britons in pre- Revolutionary Russia, and yet is much less well-known than the enormous holdings of material on diplomatic, commercial and military activities in the Public Record Office, National Maritime Museum, National Museum of Scotland and numerous collections of private papers in the Manuscript Room of the British 1 Library or other British depositories.' The Guildhall Library is located in a modern building adja- cent to the ancient Guildhall, official site for the Lord Mayor and the Corporation of the City of London, in an area close to St. Paul's and the financial distriat, rich in association with Russian- Br:itish connections. Nearby is Russia Street, a reminder that heire was the headquarters of The Russia Company, established in thE; sixteenth century to direct and control trade between the England of Elizabeth and the Russia of Ivan IV. The Russia Co'mpany's own records of early trade and diplomatic encounters were partly destroyed by the Great Fire of 1666 but they are fairly cornplete for the later period.2 However, my particular interest was in the institution established by The Russia Company in the eighteenth- century, which lasted into the 1920s, the English Church, and it is those records which are the focus of this report. The merchants who were sent out by The Russia Company, first to Moscow and later to St. Petersburg, were expected to stay thE.Te for several years ; they resided in a segregated area, and for " The research on which this account is based was supported by a Summer Faculty Fellowship from the University of Southern Maine. I am grateful to Roger Bartlett of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies of the University of London for drawing my attention to the church archives of the Guildhall Library. 3. An excellent compilation of information is Janet M. Hartley's Guide to Documents and Manuscripts in the United Kingdom Relating to Russia and the Soviet Union (London: Mansell Publishing Ltd., 1987). a. T. S. Will an, The Early History of the Russia Company, 1553-1603 (Manchester: Univ. of Manchester Press, 1968 [reprint of 1956 edition]), v. 66 the most part tried to maintain as much as possible their identities as Englishmen. One very important part of that identity was re- ligious affiliation, a concern shared by the directors of The Russia Company, and so in 1723 they decided to hire a minister of the Church of England, whose duties would be to serve the Anglican community in Russia--a group almost synonymous with the British merchants and diplomats, but also including some of the soldiers and sailors who served the tsars and tsarinas of Russia.3 The story of the various ministers has been well told by A. G. Cross,4 but although this information does shed consid- erable light on the relations between the parent company in London, and its employees (the minister, and his flock), my con- cern is with the records kept by these ministers of the activities of the Anglican Church in Russia, and how they may provide valu- able assistance to those interested in the social interactions of the British community in Russia, as well as the contacts of this ' community-social, religious and political-with other groups. I learned about, and made use of the archive, through studying the career of an Englishman, George Tatte, in the Russian Imperial Navy of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth cen- turies. Letters back to his family were few, and although pub- lished references were somewhat more nunnerous, both dealt mostly with details of his service, battles, and promotions. I hoped to learn more about Tate himself, and especially whether he had married while in Russia; I did know that on his death in 1821, he had had a burial service at the English Chuxch. (Located at 26 Naberezhnaia Krasnogo Flota, formerly Angliiskaia Naberezhna, the beautiful Classical building, built in 1754 and repaired and enlarged by Quarenghi in 1812, now houses an ex- cursion bureau; I am told that the hall upstairs., the former church 3. A. G. Cross, "Chaplains to the British Factory in St. Petersburg, 1723.1813," European Studies Review, 2, no. 2 (1972): I25-42. On the British community, see, for example, A. G. Cross, "Samuel Greig, Catherine the Great's Scottish Admiral," Mariner's Mirror, 60, no. 3 (1974): 251-65; R.. C. Anderson, "British and American Officers in the Russian Navy," ibid., 33, 1 (1947): 17.27; Peter Putnam, ed., Seven Britons in Imperial Russia, 1698-181.2 (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1952); Ian R. Christie, "Samuel Bentham and the Western Colony at Krichev, 1784-1787," Slavonic and East European Review, 48, no. 111 (1970): 232- 47 ; M. S. Anderson, "Great Britain and the Growth of the Russian Navy in the Eighteenth Century," Mariner's Mirror, 42, no. 2 (1956): 132-46; R. P. Bartlett, "Scottish Cannon-Founders and the Russian Navy, 1768-1785," Oxford Slavonic Papers, New Series, 10 (1977): 51-72. 4. Cross, "Chaplains." .