For all Peter's interest in Iran after 1721, Russia's international relations necessarily focused on Europe. Peter had created an entirely new situation in northern and eastern Europe, and needed a new set of alliances and relationships. Most dramatic perhaps was the new relationship to Poland. The return of Peter's erstwhile ally, Augustus II, to the Polish throne after Poltava at first seemed like a great boon to Russia, again giving Russia's former chief antagonist a friendly monarch. Peter continued his earlier policy of supporting Augustus against his magnate opponents in Poland until 1715. As time passed, however, Augustus grew increasingly fearful of Russia's new power, and annoyed that Peter was keeping his conquests in the Baltic provinces. He put out feelers to the Baltic nobility, and began to look for other allies. Peter began to move away from the king and towards his Polish opponents, who proved a constant thorn in the side of the king until his death. Continued royal weakness and magnate rivalries in Poland, to boot a country heavily ruined by the Northern War, gradually changed the relationship. By the end of Peter's life the Russian ambassador in Warsaw was intriguing with the various magnate parties and other ambassadors, keeping the king in check, and operating as if Poland was a Russian protectorate, which in many respects it was until the partitions put a temporary end to its existence as a state.
Sweden also found itself in a wholly new situation. If its economy was in better shape than Poland's, and it gradually recovered from the war, politically there were many analogies. The death of Charles XII in 1718 led to a new constitution, with a weakking and powerful estates, primarily the noble estate. Though the new king had relied on Britain to try to reverse Peter's victories, he signally failed and had to agree to Peter's conditions at the 1721 Treaty of Nystad. The treaty not only ratified Peter's conquests, Ingria, Estonia, Livonia, Karelia and the Viborg district of Finland, it specified that Russia would not interfere with the new Swedish constitution. Peter was perfectly aware that Sweden's 'Age of Freedom' meant the freedom of Russian, French and British ambassadors to bribe the members of the Diet to follow their lead.
For Peter after 1721, the central point of his European policy was to retain his position in the Baltic, which led him to the Holstein alliance and later the 1724 defensive treaty with Sweden. The Holstein alliance gave him a means to pressure Denmark to remove the Sound tolls on Russian shipping, but primarily it gave him a means to influence Swedish politics. At that moment the Swedish estates were resisting King Frederick's attempts to reinforce his position, and thus supported the idea of an eventual Holstein succession (Karl Friedrich of Holstein was the son of Charles XII's sister). The idea seems to have been that Holstein could provide a base for a recovery of the Swedish position in Germany. For Peter, such aims in Sweden meant that Sweden would not be looking to regain his Baltic conquests. Thus Russia assured the leaders of the Swedish estates that she supported the new constitution and the Holstein succession, and the result was a defensive alliance that helped secure Russia's position in the Baltic. Soon afterwards Peter married his daughter Anna to Karl Friedrich. For Peter's lifetime the arrangement brought security, but Russia was to abandon the commitment to Holstein in 1732, as it no longer was needed to restrain Sweden. (The only importance of the whole episode was that it led to the birth of the future Peter III.) In all these manoeuvres around the Baltic Peter avoided taking sides among the larger European powers. Russia would chose Austria for an ally only after his death.
Russia's role in larger European politics was extensive, but should not be exaggerated. Though dominant in north-eastern Europe, Russia did not become a truly Europe-wide power until the Seven Year's War. For the main European rivalry of the time, that of France with the Habsburgs, Holland and Britain, Russia was still peripheral. France did not even bother to send a permanent ambassador until after Nystad, using only low-level commercial agents before. For the Habsburgs, Russia was obviously crucial because of the Ottomans, and Peter's involvement in German affairs brought a sharp reaction. Russian and Austrian ambassadors had complex relations in Warsaw, sometimes antagonistic, sometimes working together. The Dutch and English had commercial relations with Russia, and their stake in the stability of the Baltic and its trade meant that Peter's advances caused great excitement and occasional fear. None of this, however, had much to do with the crucial points of conflict in Flanders, the Rhineland, North America and Asia. Russia remained a major regional power, part of the northern and Balkan systems that overlapped with the conflicts farther west at certain points, but was not part of those conflicts.
***
Peter's dreams and Russia's new position demanded not only a better army and navy, it demanded a new diplomatic corps. Most of all this meant permanent Russian ambassadors outside of Russia, in Istanbul as well as Russia's neighbours and the major powers. Before Peter, the Ambassadorial Office (Posol'skii prikaz) had been one of the most sophisticated of Russian offices, maintaining detailed records of embassies and negotiations and abroad service of news collecting. European newsletters were obtained in large numbers and translated into Russian to be read in the boyar duma on a regular basis. Russian culture changed rapidly after about 1650, with knowledge of Polish and Latin spreading among the elite and much geographic knowledge in translation as well. None of this, however, could substitute for diplomats on the spot, and in the 1667 treaty with Poland there had been provisions for the exchange of permanent residents. In Moscow by the 1690s the Polish ambassador was part of a group that included emissaries from the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark and the Holy Roman Emperor, but Russia sent out permanent ambassadors only from 1699. The first two were Andrei Matveev (1699) to the Netherlands (and north-west Europe in general) and Prince Petr Golitsyn to Vienna (1701). These were men with knowledge of (at least) Latin, and some reading on European states, and they also brought their wives and servants. Bringing families was not easy (Princess Golitsyna was very unhappy with high-heeled shoes and stockings), but it meant that Russian diplomats could begin to mix in elite society with greater ease. The new diplomats were men of considerable learning, as Matveev's writings and library demonstrate. He wrote his communications to the Dutch government at first in Latin, but later seems to have learned French. Prince Boris Kurakin, his successor in the Hague and later ambassador to other countries, spoke Italian best of all, a language he learned in Venice. Peter sent him there in 1697 to learn languages and navigation, and he seems to have passed his navigation tests, but learned his Italian also from the famous Venetian courtesans. He found in Venice a justification and ideology of aristocratic government, which he developed in private notes and writings on Russian history and European states, all the time serving the absolute tsar.
Most of the Russian ambassadors were indeed great aristocrats (Matveev the exception here). Kurakin, the Golitsyns, several Dolgorukiis, were all princes and men who could hold their own in contests of honour and pride, as well as political acumen, with their European counterparts. Peter also found foreigners to serve him in this capacity, the unfortunate Patkul but also James Bruce, Heinrich Ostermann, and lesser lights like Johann Baron von Urbich and Johann Baron von Schleinitz. At the centre of this network in Russia was Gavriil Ivanovich Golovkin (1660-1734), who took over foreign policy after the death of Fedor Golovin in 1706. Golovkin came from a noble but not aristocratic family, but he had been part of Peter's household since 1676. He stayed in Moscow in 1697, where Peter wrote to him regularly. His second in command was Petr Pavlovich Shafirov (1669-1739), the son of a converted Jew brought to Moscow in the 1650s. Shafirov was a professional, a translator in the Ambassadorial Office since 1691, serving in that capacity on the Great Embassy. Later he was Fedor Golovin's personal secretary. Golovkin found him indispensable for his knowledge of languages and European politics, though nobody seems to have liked him. He was ambassador to Istanbul in the crucial years after the Prut campaign, and Russia's extrication from that mess owed much to his skill. In court politics Golovkin retained a strict neutrality, as did Shafirov at first. After 1714 he was moving closer to the aristocrats, perhaps out of enmity with Menshikov. Both Golovkin and Shafirov were part of court politics, but they were both lightweights, and both isolated and neutral for most of their careers, Golovkin entirely so and Shafirov until nearly the end of Peter's life. It was their administrative and other talents that kept them where they were, not aristocratic origins or court alliances. They were, however, what Peter needed, knowledgeable executors of his will, good organisers of diplomacy, not policy-makers.