This volume comprises a collection of documents from the Russian consuls in Australia over a period of more than half a century, from the establishment of a Russian consular service in the settler colonies in 1857 to the closure of the consulates after the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. These documents do more than shed light on the history of the establishment and development of relations between Russia and Australia, and serve as a foreign source on Australia’s history. They are also of great interest for a number of other reasons.

Among students of history, it is widely recognised that foreign...

Yegor (Georges) Ivanovich Krehmer (1805–1859) began his career in the Foreign Ministry in the 1820s. From 1827, he was a secretary in the Russian diplomatic mission in Washington, and subsequently chargé d’affaires. In 1841, he was appointed consul general in Egypt, and, in 1845, consul general in London. During the Crimean War, when diplomatic relations between Russia and Great Britain were broken off, he did his best to maintain trading relations. Appreciating the importance of trade between the two countries and the need to extend its range, he was among the first to press for the establishment of a...

Edmund Monson Paul, who served as honorary Russian consul in Sydney, was born in 1826 or 1827 in Norwich, England, in the county of Norfolk, in the family of a silversmith. In the early 1850s, he arrived in Australia with his brother, William Sheffield Paul, settled in Sydney and established a small wholesaling business. Even before he was appointed vice-consul in 1857, Edmund had had an unexpected brush with the distant northern empire. During the years of the Crimean War, Australia had feared attacks on its port cities by the Russian Navy. These fears were, of course, groundless, but they...

The first permanent Russian consul arrived in Melbourne in January 1894. He was born on 13 January (OS) 1855 into the family of Collegiate Assessor Dmitry Aleksandrovich Poutiata,¹ and spent his childhood on an estate called Bessonovo in the Viazma district of the province of Smolensk. His father maintained a model stock-breeding farm and had won several prizes at national agricultural fairs for his achievements in producing new breeds of cattle. His son, however, chose a different career. In 1877, he graduated with a gold medal from the renowned Katkovsky Lycée, the Moscow school called ‘imperial’ in honour of the...

The consul appointed to replace Poutiata arrived in Melbourne in November 1895. His name was Robert Robertovich Ungern-Sternberg Freiherr von Pirkel, the scion of an ancient baronial line of Baltic Germans. He was born on 5 May (OS) 1845 in the province of Estland (Estonia) on the island of Dagö, now known as Hiiumaa,¹ and his family owned a large number of landed estates in the area.

In 1857, Robert Ungern-Sternberg’s father sent him to school in Reval (now Tallinn), after which he studied law at the universities of Geneva and Berlin, and later the Imperial University in Odessa, where...

After the departure of Ungern-Sternberg, Nikolai Gavrilovich Matiunin was appointed to the Melbourne consulate, but owing to ill health he was unable to take up the position. In July 1899, without having reached Australia, he was relieved of his duties. On 29 August (OS) 1899, Nikolai Pompeyevich Passek was appointed Russian consul.¹ He left St Petersburg in February 1900 for Odessa, and from there sailed for Suez, and thence on the French steamerAustraliento Melbourne, where he arrived at the very end of March, after a short stay in Adelaide. When the Australian press announced his arrival, a brief...

Mikhail Mikhailovich Ustinov came from a large noble family, as did his first cousin once removed, the famous British actor Sir Peter Ustinov. The future Russian consul in Melbourne was born in Moscow in 1861. His father, an army officer whose military career was cut short by illness, had a long-lasting affair with a Frenchwoman named Marie-Louise Tetevund, who bore him a son, Mikhail, and a daughter, Lidia. When his beloved died, the father married Olga Prezhentsova, the daughter of a landowner from Tula, but he did not neglect his children born out of wedlock; he ensured that they were...

From the date of Ustinov’s departure from Australia in May 1906 until the arrival of a new Russian diplomat, Matvei Matveyevich Hedenstrom, in March 1908, the Russian Consulate General was managed by the French consul in Melbourne, P. Maistre.¹ Hedenstrom was born on 12 December (OS) 1858 in Odessa into the family of a captain in the Yelisavetgrad Hussars.² He was a grandson of Baron Matvei Matveyevich Hedenstrom, the renowned explorer of Northern Siberia. Upon graduation from the University of Kiev in 1882 he joined the Kiev Palace of Justice, but voluntarily resigned that post the next year. In 1886,...

Alexander Nikolayevich Abaza was Tsarist Russia’s last official representative in Australia. He was born on 4 August (OS) 1872 in Tiflis (Tbilisi), a member of an illustrious noble family of Moldavian origin. One of his great uncles was Nikolai Savvich Abaza, a provincial governor and member of the Council of State, and another, Alexander Ageyevich Abaza, was Minister of Finance in 1880–1881. A second cousin, Rear-Admiral Aleksei Mikhailovich Abaza, was influential in political circles in the early twentieth century and a member of the so-called ‘Bezobrazov clique’.¹ In 1891, the future consul graduated from grammar school in Kharkov and...