Mikhail Nikolayevich Muravyov

Count Mikhail Nikolayevich Muravyov or Muraviev (Russian: Михаи́л Никола́евич Муравьёв) (April 19 [O.S. April 7] 1845, Saint Petersburg June 21 [O.S. June 8] 1900) was a Russian statesman who advocated transferring the attention of Russian foreign policy from Europe to the Far East. He is probably best remembered for having initiated the Hague Peace Conference.

M.N. Muravyov

Life and career

Mikhail Muravyov was the son of General Count Nicholas Muravyov (governor of Grodno), and grandson of Count Mikhail Nikolayevich Muravyov-Vilensky, who became notorious for his drastic measures in stamping out the Polish insurrection of 1863 in the Lithuanian provinces. He was educated at a secondary school at Poltava, and was for a short time at Heidelberg University.

In 1864, he entered the chancellery of the minister of foreign affairs at St.Petersburg, and was soon afterwards attached to the Russian legation at Stuttgart, where he attracted the notice of Queen Olga of Württemberg. He was transferred to Berlin, then to Stockholm, and back again to Berlin. In 1877, he was second secretary at the Hague. During the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78, he was a delegate of the Red Cross Society in charge of an ambulance train provided by Queen Olga of Württemberg.

After the war, he was successively first secretary in Paris, chancellor of the embassy in Berlin, and then minister in Copenhagen. In Denmark, he was brought much into contact with the imperial family, and, on the death of Prince Lobanov-Rostovsky in 1896, he was appointed by Tsar Nicholas II to be his minister of foreign affairs.

The next three and a half years were a critical time for European diplomacy. The revolt of Crete against Ottoman rule and events leading to the Boxer Rebellion in China were disturbing factors. Count Muravyov's policy regarding Crete was vacillating; in China, his hands were forced by Germany's action at Kiaochow. He misled Britain concerning the Russian leases of Port Arthur and Talienwan from China; he told the British ambassador that these would be open ports, and afterwards significantly modified this pledge.

When Tsar Nicholas II inaugurated the Peace Conference at the Hague in 1899, Count Muravyov extricated his country from a situation of some embarrassment in China; but when, subsequently, Russian agents in Manchuria and Peking connived at the agitation which culminated in the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, relations between Muravyov and the tsar became strained. Muravyov died suddenly on June 21, 1900, after a stormy interview with Sergei Witte and Aleksey Kuropatkin in which Witte laid considerable blame on Muravyov for the crisis in China (Muravyov had insisted on taking Port Arthur against Witte's advice); because there was a wound on his left temple when he died, there was a rumor that he had committed suicide, but "the official government announcement asserted that, after rising late, he had merely slipped in his study and grazed his temple on the sharp side of a bureau."[1]

He was awarded Order of the White Eagle and a number of other decorations.[2]

Notes

  1. Ian Nish, The Origins of the Russo-Japanese War (Longman, 1985; ISBN 0582491142), p. 73.
  2. Acović, Dragomir (2012). Slava i čast: Odlikovanja među Srbima, Srbi među odlikovanjima. Belgrade: Službeni Glasnik. p. 631.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
gollark: Well, yes, but they're byte sequences.
gollark: I mean, it's better than C and stuff, and I wouldn't mind writing simple apps in it.
gollark: Speaking specifically about the error handling, it may be "simple", but it's only "simple" in the sense of "the compiler writers do less work". It's very easy to mess it up by forgetting the useless boilerplate line somewhere, or something like that.
gollark: Speaking more generally than the type system, Go is just really... anti-abstraction... with, well, the gimped type system, lack of much metaprogramming support, and weird special cases, and poor error handling.
gollark: - They may be working on them, but they initially claimed that they weren't necessary and they don't exist now. Also, I don't trust them to not do them wrong.- Ooookay then- Well, generics, for one: they *kind of exist* in that you can have generic maps, channels, slices, and arrays, but not anything else. Also this (https://fasterthanli.me/blog/2020/i-want-off-mr-golangs-wild-ride/), which is mostly about the file handling not being good since it tries to map on concepts which don't fit. Also channels having weird special syntax. Also `for` and `range` and `new` and `make` basically just being magic stuff which do whatever the compiler writers wanted with no consistency- see above- Because there's no generic number/comparable thing type. You would need to use `interface{}` or write a new function (with identical code) for every type you wanted to compare- You can change a signature somewhere and won't be alerted, but something else will break because the interface is no longer implemented- They are byte sequences. https://blog.golang.org/strings.- It's not. You need to put `if err != nil { return err }` everywhere.

References

Political offices
Preceded by
Aleksey Lobanov-Rostovsky
Foreign Minister of Russia
18971900
Succeeded by
Vladimir Lamsdorf
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