Roman Rosen

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Baron Rosen was one of the members of the Russian delegation that negotiated the end of the Russo-Japanese War at the Portsmouth Peace Conference in 1905 mediated by Theodore Roosevelt

Baron Roman Romanovitch Rosen (February 24, 1847 — December 31, 1921) was a Russian diplomat. He served as the Russian ambassador to Japan and the United States during the Russo-Japanese War.

[edit] Biography

The baron was from a long line of Russian nobles that included musicians and military leaders. One of his ancestors, another Baron Rosen, won distinction in command of the Astrakhanskii Cuirassier Regiment at the Battle of Borodino on September 7, 1812 for which he was noted in the official battlefield report of Major General Borozdin to General Barclay de Tolly.^[1]

A Washington Post article dated July 5, 1905 reported, "Baron Rosen is of Swedish ancestry, his forebears having followed Swedish King Gustavus Adolphus in his invasion of Russia and settled there. He was chargé d'affaires at Tokyo and later at Washington, and was acting in a judicial capacity as the mouthpiece of an international tribunal that was regarded as discourteous to Japan. ... As judicial minister, he reformed the judicial system of Siberia." Actually, the family was Bohemian and included one Marshal of France and one Austrian Field-Marshal.

Full-size seated portrait of Baron Rosen

Rosen became a diplomatic expert for the Balkans, Japan and America. He served as Consul-General in New York since 1884, and as Russian minister in Mexico from 1889 to 1893. Afterwards he was appointed Minister to Serbia where he stayed until 1897. After a short term as Russian minister in Tokyo in 1897-98 he suddenly was transferred to the rather symbolic post as minister in Bavaria in 1898. In 1900 his diplomatic career revived when he changed Munich for Greece, and in 1902 his most important period commenced when he was reinstalled as minister in Tokyo. There he failed in his efforts to prevent the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-05 that was prepared by an influental government and court faction in St. Petersburg. When US president Theodore Roosevelt attempted to mediate the hostilities, Rosen was chosen as new Russian ambassador to the United States and as Sergei Witte's deputy within the Russian peace delegation. Rosen travelled to the Portsmouth Peace Conference and cooperated with Witte in negotiating a cessation of hostilities and a peace treaty.^[2]

Rosen stayed in the USA until autumn 1911, when he was recalled to St. Petersburg to leave the diplomatic service and to be appointed by the Tsar to the Council of the Empire State Council of Imperial Russia. He held this membership in the Russian parliamentary Upper House under the constitution of 1905 until the overthrow of the monarchy by the February Revolution in 1917. After the Bolshevik takeover in November 1917 October Revolution and the subsequent persecution of the old political and social elites, Rosen and his family managed to escape from Russia with the help of Western diplomatic friends in the end of the year 1918. From his first exile in Sweden he changed to the USA, where he wrote a series of articles about European diplomacy and politics for The Saturday Evening Post, including "Forty Years of a Diplomat's Life" published in 41 parts in 1919-1921.^[3]

[edit] Notes

^ The report is available online
^ "Text of Treaty; Signed by the Emperor of Japan and Czar of Russia," New York Times. October 17, 1905.
^ When those political memories where published as a 2-volume-book in New York in 1922, the author was not alive any more. Rosen died in a car accident on the last day of 1921. A bibliography of Rosen's articles in The Saturday Evening Post is available online