The relationship between the peoples of Russia (historically referred to as Rus') and England is one of the oldest continuous diplomatic threads in European history. Spanning over 450 years of official contact—and unofficial trade long before that—the "Rus-Eng" dynamic has weathered everything from Tsarist autocracy and revolutionary upheaval to wartime alliance and Cold War hostility. Part 1: The Tudor Beginnings (1553–1598) The formal relationship began not with ambassadors, but with a search for gold and a frozen corpse.
Tsarina Alexandra was a granddaughter of Queen Victoria. King George V and Tsar Nicholas II were first cousins—they looked nearly identical. When Nicholas abdicated, Britain initially offered asylum, but George V—fearing revolutionary contagion and political backlash from Labour—withdrew the offer. Nicholas and his family were executed in 1918. This decision haunted the British monarchy for decades. rus eng
In 1553, King Edward VI sent three ships under Sir Hugh Willoughby to find the Northeast Passage to China. Two ships were trapped in Arctic ice; Willoughby and his crew were later found frozen to death off the coast of Lapland. However, the third ship—the Edward Bonaventure under Richard Chancellor—survived. Chancellor sailed into the White Sea and traveled overland to Moscow. The relationship between the peoples of Russia (historically
Britain (and later the US) supplied the USSR via perilous Arctic convoys to Murmansk and Archangel. British sailors lost over 3,000 lives on this route. The Soviets received thousands of tanks, aircraft, and millions of boots and tons of aluminum—material that helped them survive 1941–42 and win at Stalingrad. Tsarina Alexandra was a granddaughter of Queen Victoria
Throughout the 1930s, British elites were deeply divided: some saw Stalin as a lesser evil to Hitler; others, like Winston Churchill, despised communism but pragmatically noted the need for a second front against Nazism. The German invasion of the USSR in June 1941 forced Britain and Soviet Russia into a wartime marriage of convenience. Churchill famously declared: "If Hitler invaded Hell, I would at least make a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons."
Paradoxically, by 1907 the two empires signed the Anglo-Russian Convention , settling their Central Asian disputes and joining France to form the Triple Entente against Germany. The reason: both feared the rising power of Imperial Germany more than each other.