Tijdschrift voor Mediageschiedenis

The acquisition of foreign news in 17th-century Russia differed in important respects from that in Western Europe. Whereas newspapers began to be printed in the West early in the 17th century, there were no printed newspapers in Russia until the beginning of the 18th century. However, starting early in the 17th century, foreign merchants and special agents brought printed newspapers and manuscript newsletters to Moscow, where the professional translators of the Muscovite Diplomatic Chancery (Posol’skij prikaz) translated them into Russian. These translations and summaries (known as kuranty, from the Dutch word courant, ‘coranto’) were then read aloud to the tsar and his close advisers, but were not intended for public consumption. At first, the foreign news-sheets arrived at irregular intervals, but starting around 1665 with the establishment of a postal connection between Moscow and Western Europe, they arrived quite regularly. German and Dutch newspapers were the main sources for the Russian translations. While holdings of Dutch newspapers as well as the Russian kuranty are incomplete, a comparison of all the extant copies in both Western and Russian archives and libraries for the period from 1620 to 1670 shows that nearly all translations from Dutch were made from newspapers printed in either Amsterdam or Haarlem. The (Oprechte) Haerlemse Courant (founded in 1656) was one of the most important sources. When Tsar Peter I (‘the Great’) decreed in December 1702 the printing of the first Russian newspaper (Vedomosti), its production was facilitated by the well-established routines for producing the kuranty.The article describes how (and how fast) the foreign – especially Dutch – sources for the kuranty came to Russia, how the translators selected news items for translation, and how, on occasion, the Russian tsar reacted to reports in Dutch newspapers. It also shows that Dutch newspapers helped shape the worldview of the Russian political elite.