This Festschrift celebrates a highly esteemed colleague, who has devoted his life to teaching Russian and research about the Russian language and Russia, Finland’s neighbor to the East. Arto Mustajoki has been and is, so to say, an intermediary between two cultures. My contribution deals with cultural intermediaries of an earlier period, more specifically with people who lived in Russia and enabled cultural and political contacts with foreign countries some centuries ago, when foreign languages could neither be learned at school nor studied at university level. This short overview covers the period up to the early 17th century, that is, the time during which knowing a foreign language – especially a West-European one – was still something very exotic for a Russian citizen.