Sergei Bogoiavlenskii

Born Feb. 17 (Mar. 1), 1871, in Moscow; died there Aug. 31,1947. Soviet historian and archaeologist. Corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1929).

Bogoiavlenskii graduated from Moscow University in 1895. In 1898 he began working in the archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. After the Great October Socialist Revolution he worked first in the Moscow Oblast archives and then in the Central Administration of Archives. He was a professor at Moscow University from 1922 to 1929; from 1939 to 1947 he was a senior scientific worker at the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR.

Bogoiavlenskii participated in archaeological expeditions in the Baltic region during 1895–96. On the basis of his study of many museum collections and his own materials, he published works on the history of the migration of the Livonians from Karelia to the Baltic region; in these he provided a new ethnic determination of burial grounds from the Zapadnaia Dvina River to Gdańsk. He excavated several hundred burial mounds in the Moscow vicinity and compiled an archaeological map of the Moscow Oblast with a detailed, carefully verified explanatory text.

One of Bogoiavlenskii’s most significant discoveries was the finding and publication in 1900, with detailed scientific commentaries, of the previously unknown Law Code of Tsar Feodor loannovich, 1589. He subsequently published other sources as well, including the fifth and sixth volumes of the Novgorod Cadastres and Acts of the Interregnum. He devoted several works to the history of Moscow, such as “The Moscow Slobody and Sotni in the XVII Century” (in the collection The Moscow Krai in the Past, part 2, 1930), “The Moscow Nemetskaia Sloboda (Foreign Settlement)” (in Izvestiia AN SSSR: Seriia istoriiifilosofii, 1947, vol. 4, no. 3), and several chapters in the History of Moscow (vol. 1,1952). He did work on the history of state institutions and on matters concerning the class struggle in Russia in the 17th century: “On theGunnery Prikaz (Office)” in Collection of Articles in Honor of M. K. Liubavskii, 1917; “The Khovanskii Movement” in Istoricheskie zapiski, vol. 10, 1940; Heads of Prikazy in the XVII Century, and others. He devoted a number of works to the history of Russia’s foreign policy in the 18th and 19th centuries and the history of the peoples of the Volga region, Middle Asia, and the Balkan Peninsula. He was awarded two orders.