Bismarck in Petersburg: Three Years that Defined Europe.

In March 1859, Otto von Bismarck arrived in the capital of the Russian Empire as the envoy of Prussia. The appointment was an honorary exile: in Frankfurt, he had argued too sharply with Vienna, and the Berlin court preferred to remove the inconvenient diplomat far away - to the Neva. Bismarck himself joked that he was put on ice. The ice turned out to be useful.

He took the Russian language seriously - hired a teacher, read newspapers and Herzen's "Bell," and within a year he could understand conversations held in his presence, assuming that the Germans would not understand anything. He was most struck by the word "nothing": the universal Russian consolation that was offered in response to both a broken axle and a lost campaign. He remembered it for the rest of his life.

He was welcomed at court. The mother of Alexander II, a born Prussian princess, saw him as one of her own; the emperor himself conversed with the envoy more willingly than with other ministers. His main interlocutor - and future rival - became Chancellor Gorchakov, from whom Bismarck, by his own admission, learned a lot before he began to play against him.
The Petersburg years nearly cost him his life: unsuccessful treatment of his leg after a hunt led to an infection, and doctors were preparing for the worst. He went bear hunting, froze, missed Germany, and wrote long dispatches that were read half-heartedly in Berlin.

The main outcome he took away in his mind. Bismarck understood: the unification of Germany was only possible with the benevolent neutrality of Russia. This scheme he implemented - in the wars of 1864, 1866, and 1870, Petersburg did not intervene.