Of the five centuries during which the British and Russians have been in more or less constant contact, the eighteenth century is the most interesting, the most attractive and the most varied in the forms that contact assumed, or so it appears to my undoubtedly prejudiced eye. The sixteenth century had the excitement of ‘first-footing’, the fascination of a rapprochement between a Russia ruled by Ivan the Terrible and an England under Elizabeth, and came to a close with a masque of the Muscovites in a Shakespearean comedy; the seventeenth century had its periods of warming relations under the enlightened Boris Godunov and of considerable cooling under Aleksei Mikhailovich; the nineteenth century, on the other hand, throws us deep into ‘Great Power’ struggles and love-hate relationships, Russophilia and Russophobia, Anglomania but never quite Anglophobia, the first really bloody conflict between the two nations notwithstanding; and the twentieth century, tsarist and soviet, offers infinite variety in cultural, ideological and political counterpoint and confrontation, with the pendulum swinging violently from Russian Fever to Red Menace, from ally to foe. The eighteenth century had something of all these features and much that was distinctly its own.

In Peter I and Catherine II, it had pre-eminently two rulers on the Russian side whose personalities and activities made them the stuff of legend and whose generally positive attitudes towards Britain and the British brought to relations between the two countries the colour and drama which were conspicuously missing on the British side in the first Georges.