Stepan Veselovskii

Born Sept. 4 (16), 1876, in Moscow. Died Jan. 23, 1952, in Moscow. Soviet historian, academician of the USSR Academy of Sciences (1946). Born into the family of an agronomist. Graduated from the law faculty of Moscow University in 1902.

Veselovskii was a professor at Moscow State University from 1917 to 1925 and a professor at the History and Archive Institute from 1938 to 1941. In 1936 he became senior scientific staff member of the History Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. Veselovskii was a prominent expert on the archives of official acts concerning the history of feudal Russia. His first historical researches were on the history of law and on the national economy and finances of the Muscovite state in the 16th and 17th centuries. In his works from the Soviet period Veselovskii placed greater emphasis on social and economic questions, in particular, the history of feudal land tenure and the peasantry from the 14th to the 17th centuries. He also studied the political history of Russia from the late 15th to the early 17th centuries (Investigations on the History of the Oprichnina, 1963). Among the especially valuable works of Veselovskii are his publication of the sources on the history of feudal land tenure, his study of the sources of the cadastre system in the 16th and 17th centuries, and his research on V. K. Klein’s work The Uglich Investigation of the Death of Tsarevich Dimitrii. Veselovskii was also an important specialist in the auxiliary branches of history.