Firsov, Nikolai

Born Sept. 18 (30), 1864, in Kazan; died Apr. 7, 1934, in Moscow. Russian historian.

Firsov graduated from the University of Kazan in 1888. He began teaching there in 1891 and attained the rank of professor in the Russian history department in 1903. In works on 18th-century Russian trade, Firsov examined the role of government policy in the origin of large trading and industrial companies and in the stimulation of foreign trade. In Soviet times he studied the history and ethnography of the non-Russian peoples of the Middle Volga Region and did research on the economic history of Russia, the peasant movements of the 17th to 19th centuries, and the Russian revolutionary movement of the 19th century.