Zagoskin, Nikolai

Born July 20 (Aug. 1), 1851, in St. Petersburg; died there Feb. 6 (19), 1912. Historian of Russian state law and a prominent bourgeois liberal.

The son of a noble, Zagoskin graduated from the University of Kazan in 1874. He became a professor at the university in 1879 and was rector from 1906 to 1909; he became director of the Kazan Advanced Courses for Women in 1911. From 1883 to 1900 he published in Kazan the newspaper Volzhskii vestnik (Volga Herald). He wrote studies on the theory of state law and on the estate structure of pre-Petrine Russia, in particular the monograph The Legal Code of the Tsar and Grand Prince Aleksei Mikhailovich and the Zemskii Sobor of 1648-9 (1879). His History of Kazan University in four volumes was published in 1902-04. His bibliographical index The Science of the History of Russian Law (1891) still retains its significance.