Piotr Chafirov

Origins and early life

Piotr Chafirov was born at Smolensk in 1669, the son of Pavel Filipovich Chafirov, a Polish Jew who had been baptized with his whole family and worked as a translator for the Russian foreign office, and who was ennobled under Tsar Fyodor III; the Jewish origin is therefore at the level of his father, and this fiche states plainly that Piotr himself was raised in the Orthodox faith and that his enemies used his ancestry against him all his life.

Work and career

He began as a clerk in a Moscow shop, entered the Posolsky prikaz, the department of foreign affairs, as a translator like his father, and was noticed by Peter the Great, who took him to Europe on the Grand Embassy of 1697. He rose to become vice-chancellor and effective head of Russian diplomacy, and in July 1711, when Peter's army was surrounded by an Ottoman force many times its size on the river Pruth and the tsar faced capture, Chafirov crossed to the Turkish camp and negotiated the treaty that let the army withdraw in exchange for Azov; he then stayed four years in Constantinople as a hostage for its execution.

He negotiated with Prussia, Denmark, Poland and France, was made a baron and a privy councillor, and in 1717 published the Discourse on the Causes of the Swedish War, the first Russian work of international law, which justified Peter's war in the language of European jurisprudence. This fiche also records what followed: in 1723, after the tsar's favour turned in a quarrel with Prince Menshikov, he was tried for corruption, and his Jewish descent, which he was accused of concealing, was used at the trial; he was sentenced to death, brought to the block, and reprieved on the scaffold, then exiled.

Recalled after Peter's death, he served the later empresses as an ambassador and again as a senator, and died at Saint Petersburg on 1 March 1739.