Kees Boterbloem: Moderniser of Russia. Andrei Vinius, 1641–1716. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. VII, 271 S. ISBN: 978-1-137-32366-8

Kees Boterbloem: Moderniser of Russia. Andrei Vinius, 1641–1716. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. VII, 271 S. ISBN: 978-1-137-32366-8.

Kees Boterbloem has an ambitious goal for this biography of a tsarist official. Using the career of Andrei Vinius, a Russian-born son of a Dutchman who entered tsarist service, Boterbloem intends to explore the pivotal role of the Dutch in terms of the adoption of Western mercantile, technological, and medicinal practices in Russia, as well as demonstrate Muscovy’s transition to the “modern” Russian empire. While Muscovite historians might question Boterbloem’s description of Muscovy as “backward” (p. 21), few would doubt that seventeenth-century Russia saw a remarkable expansion and reform of the administrative system, beginning with Tsar Mikhail Fedorovich and culminating with his grandson, Peter the Great.

Vinius is an excellent choice for a study of administrative change. Following his father into the tsar’s service as a translator for the Posol’skii Prikaz in 1664, Vinius had a long and remarkable career that ended in corruption charges, leading to a brief exile in Europe before returning to Russia shortly before his death in 1716. At his peak, Vinius held several influential positions. In 1700, he was in charge of both the Sibirskii Prikaz and the Pushkarskii Prikaz, a combination which allowed him to accelerate efforts to mine ore in Siberia and to expand domestic munitions production. He ran the postal system responsible for communication with Europe and also translated Dutch scientific materials into Russia. For several years he held a leadership position in the Aptekarskii Prikaz; though he may not have had any medical training, he did have a lifelong interest in science.

With a role in several offices, Vinius’s name frequently appears in administrative correspondence. This provides sufficient material to understand the activities of these offices while Vinius was in charge, but little information on the man himself. As a result, an understanding of Vinius’s intentions or interests is lacking throughout. While this does not hinder the study’s contribution to administrative history, it does leave several questions unanswered for at least two important events in his life. The first of these is the reason for his dismissal from all of his positions shortly after 1700, apparently from Vinius’s extensive corruption. The second is his exile from, and later decision to return to, Russia. In each case, Boterbloem successfully documents the results, but Vinius’s motivations are unknown. Despite the limitation of the sources, there can be no doubt Boterbloem’s study has uncovered new dimensions to Vinius’s career. Recent works on Siberia have neglected Vinius’s prominence in the government. While acknowledging Vinius as one of the heads of the Sibirskii Prikaz, Andrew A. Gentes identified him as a “Dutch merchant” in his Exile to Siberia, 1590–1822 (2008). Christoph Witzenrath briefly mentioned the bribery and corruption charges that led to the end of Vinius’s career in his Cossacks and the Russian Empire, 1598–1725: Manipulation, Rebellion and Expansion into Siberia (2007), but none of his accomplishments.

Though this book is an undeniable contribution to the study of the Muscovite administration, it is not quite as successful in demonstrating Boterbloem’s intended goal of revealing Russian modernization. Though Vinius was born in Russia, and Orthodox, he is Boterbloem’s point of “Dutch” exchange. At several points, Boterbloem discusses the difficulty of understanding Vinius’s identity and mixed heritage, but the limitation of the sources make it impossible to demonstrate the tensions between his “Russian” and “Dutch” affiliations. As a “moderniser”, Vinius presents a mixed bag of evidence. He was not the driving force of adoptions of Western medical knowledge though he worked in the medical office. He was pivotal in the expansion of mining in Siberia, but Dutch engineers had long been involved in establishing Muscovite mining before Vinius worked for the Sibirskii Prikaz. It appears he was dismissed from the government for a combination of attempting to bribe Aleksandr Menshikov and having been caught taking innumerable bribes from local Siberian officials. Even so, Boterbloem praises his “systematic effort to colonize Siberia in a sustainable fashion” demonstrating the “recognizable traces of the modern professional bureaucrat and his modus operandi an analyzed by Max Weber” (p. 167). Such praise seems a bit lofty for an official who functioned as did many Muscovite officials, by ‘feeding’ on Russian subjects and running protections schemes.

In the conclusion, Boterbloem suggests that Peter the Great’s extensive recruitment of Western specialists for Russian service undermined Vinius’s potential contributions to the government, as his role as an interlocutor for Western technology was superseded by these new men. The argument is logical, though there is little evidence here that this generational shift did play a role. Boterbloem makes a better case stating that Vinius’s dismissal was the result of his corruption rather than the arrival of new recruits. Rather than serving as an example of a “modernizer of Russia”, it might be that Vinius was merely a typical tsarist official, who used his literacy and language skills to make personal profits at the expense of reform. Though this biography is not a study of modernization, it will be a useful book for anyone interested in understanding the expansion of the Russian administration in the dynamic seventeenth century.

Matthew P. Romaniello, Honolulu, HI