Aleksey Bestuzhev

Count Alexey Petrovich Bestuzhev-Ryumin (Russian: Алексе́й Петро́вич Бесту́жев-Рю́мин) (1 June 1693 – 21 April 1768), Chancellor of the Russian Empire, was one of the most influential and successful European diplomats of the 18th century. He was chiefly responsible for Russian foreign policy during the reign of Empress Elizaveta Petrovna.

Alexey was born at Moscow to an old noble family of Novgorod descent. His father, Pyotr Bestuzhev-Ryumin, was later to become the Russian ambassador to the duchy of Courland. Educated abroad with his elder brother Mikhail at Copenhagen and Berlin, Alexey especially distinguished himself in languages and the applied sciences.

In 1712, Peter the Great attached Bestuzhev to Prince Kurakin at the Utrecht Congress, that he might learn diplomacy; and for the same reason permitted him in 1713 to enter the service of the elector of Hanover. The elector, who became King George I of Great Britain, took him to London in 1714, and sent him to Saint Petersburg as his accredited minister with a notification of his accession. Bestuzhev then returned to England, where he remained four years. This period laid the necessary groundwork for his brilliant diplomatic career.

Bestuzhev curiously illustrated his passion for intrigue in a letter to the tsarevich Alexey Petrovich at Vienna, assuring his "future sovereign" of his devotion, and representing his sojourn in England as the deliberate seclusion of a zealous but powerless well-wisher. This extraordinary indiscretion might well have cost him his life, but the tsarevich destroyed the letter. (A copy of the letter taken by way of precaution, beforehand, by the Austrian ministers, survived in the Vienna archives.)

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