Russia – Hungary: the History of Relations

The collection is devoted to the development of relations between Russia and Hungary since the second half of the 15th century. The collection includes constitutional acts, legislative documents, archival sources from the Moscow Main Archive of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (diplomas, treatises, article lists, etc.) and other archives; reports from the Russian Ministry of Trade and Industry, secret materials from the First World War, scientific research, audio recordings, and visual materials. Most of them belong to the period of the 19th - early 20th century and to the 21st century.

The relations between Russia and Hungary have a long, more than thousand-year history, dating back to the Middle Ages, and are still developing today. The structure of the collection includes two sections: the first is related directly to Hungary, the second - to the relations between the two countries in the state and economic spheres.

Of particular value is the publication of the correspondence of the Moscow kingdom with the Hungarian court from 1485-1724, which was prepared for publication by archaeographer N. N. Bantysh-Kamensky, the manager of the Moscow archive of the College of Foreign Affairs. It is known that during this period Hungary was a part of the Holy Roman Empire with small interruptions until its dissolution in 1806. An interesting document is the agreement between the ministers of Bohemia, Hungary, Austria, Bavaria and other German principalities, dated 1802, which testifies to the increasing influence of France and the beginning of the redrawing of the borders of European states. The materials of the collection reveal the peculiarities of the "land crisis" of European farms at the end of the 19th century, which also affected Austria-Hungary. This is the subject of a study commissioned by the Commission on the Fall in Prices of Agricultural Products at the Ministry of the Interior - A Sketch of the Organisation of Land Credit in England, Germany, Austria-Hungary and France. From 1867 the Kingdom of Hungary became a sovereign part of the Habsburg monarchy, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, until its destruction during the First World War. Among the wartime documents are the materials of the Committee for the Restriction of Enemy Supply and Trade (1915), which was responsible for collecting information on enemy foreign trade. Other archival documents from the First and Second World Wars, as well as modern official agreements on bilateral co-operation in various fields are also presented.

The collection is based on digitised documents from the Russian State Historical Archive, the Library of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Russian State Library, the State Public Historical Library, the Central Naval Library of the Ministry of Defence, the Library of Congress and the Library of St. Petersburg State University.