Korostovets, Ivan

Korostovets, Ivan [Коростовець, Іван; Korostovec'], b 6 September 1862 in the Chernihiv region, d 1 January 1933 in Paris. Career diplomat. Educated in Saint Petersburg, he headed the Russian diplomatic chancellery in Port Arthur (1899–1902), was Count Sergei Witte’s secretary at the Portsmouth Conference (1905), and was the Russian ambassador in Peking (1907–12) and Teheran (1913–17). As a plenipotentiary of the Hetman government, he met with representatives of the Entente Powers in Iaşi in November 1918. Following the collapse of Hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky’s Ukrainian State, Korostovets emigrated to Finland, and then to Berlin. His diary of the Portsmouth Conference was published in English in 1920. He also wrote a book on Russia in the Far East (in Russian, Rossiia na Dal'nom Vostoke, 1922) and a history of Mongolia (in German, Von Cinggis Khan zur Sowjetrepublik, 1926). The diary Korostovets kept while on a diplomatic mission to Manchuria in August 1912–May 1913 was published in the journal Rossiiane v Azii 1–3 (Autumn 1994–Autumn 1996); a few additional ‘lost’ pages appeared in Rossiiane v Azii 5 (Autumn 1998). An account of the 1912–13 diary, by O. Bakich, appears in M. Gervers and W. Schlepp (eds), Cultural Contact, History, and Ethnicity in Inner Asia (1996).

[This article was updated in 2025.]