Mikhail Bogoslovskii

Born Mar. 13 (25), 1867, in Moscow; died there on Apr. 20, 1929. Russian historian, Academician of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1921).

Bogoslovskii was a student of V. O. Kliuchevskii. He graduated from Moscow University in 1891. In 1902 he defended the master’s dissertation Peter the Great’s Reform of Provincial Administration: The Province, 1719–1727, and in 1909 he defended the doctoral dissertation Zemstvo Self-government in the Russian North in the 17th Century (parts 1–2,1909–12). He became a professor at Moscow University in 1911. Bogoslovskii’s main area of concentration was 18th-century Russian history. His works include an extensive and scientifically verified biography of Peter I, Peter the First: Material for a Biography (vols. 1–5,1940–48). He also wrote Everyday Life and Customs of the Russian Nobility in the First Half of the 18th Century (1906; 2nd ed., 1918) and Peter the Great and his Reform (1920). He wrote a secondary school textbook and a lecture course on 18th- and 19th-century Russian history which were published by his students. Bogoslovskii was secretary of the Moscow Society of History and Russian Antiquities and chairman of the Russian Historical Society. Later he was chairman of the Russian history section of the History Institute of the Russian Association of Social Science Research Institutes.