As a student in St. Petersburg, this son of a former serf helped to organize a Literary and Scientific Society as a countermeasure to unrest among others. Shliapkin began his teaching career in Russian literature, and his lectures were widely attended, including by Roerich. From this he developed a path into ancient Slavic manuscripts and paleography. He also taught ad the Military-Juridical Academy, the St. Petersburg Women’s Pedagogical Institute, and contributed to the Pskov Archaeological Museum. A member of the Society of Lovers of Ancient Literature, he traveled and excavated widely under its auspices.
Institution: Bestuzhev_Courses
Nikitskii was yet another priest’s son who received his education in the seminary, but was sent to St. Petersburg to train for a career as a teacher. His talents at Greek would have been wasted at a gymnasium, and he became a respected scholar of Greek epigraphy. He also taught at the St. Petersburg Women’s Pedagogical Institute. At the Odessa Congress, he argued that Novgorod had already opened a Window on the West via trade through the Neva, so Muscovite conquest was detrimental.
The son of a classical philologist, Mikhail Ivanovich followed and exceeded by becoming a scholar of international repute, interlacing the cultural influences in the southern region of the Russian empire. A student of Scythia, Hellenism, and Rome antiquity, his “Iranians and Greeks in South Russia” (1922) remains a canonical work on ancient history. Prolific even before his emigration to the United States after the Bolshevik Revolution, he began shaping the field from Russia. Although he wrote also in German and was a member of the Berlin Academy of Sciences, his anti-German stance during the Great War prevented his acceptance there. He served as president of the American Historical Association in 1935.
Katerina Mel’nik began studying with Vladimir Antonovich in Kiev, one of the first female archeologists – although dramatically different from Praskovia Uvarova. She and Antonovich carried on an affair until they married in 1902, following the death of his wife. Both active participants in numerous congresses, it is impossible to imagine that others were not aware of this relationship, especially given his close relationship with Praskovia. Katerina published in Kievskaia starina, among other journals. In 1919, she was appointed to the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, but her primary seemed to be editing Antonovich’s massive archive. She also used her position there to try to organize an archeological congress in Odesa circa 1922, but without success.
Best known as one of the founders of the Kadet Party in post-1905 Russia, and very briefly the Minister of Foreign Affairs in the first Provisional Government after Nicholas II’s abdication, Miliukov became an archeologist for a few years by happenstance. Twice exiled from Moscow in the 1890s because of his participation in political protests at the university, where he had studied and then taught history, Miliukov went to Riazan for two years, where he worked on the local Archival Commission, and then later as a history professor at the University of Sophia. In both places he joined with locals and participated in excavations, and presented his findings at three archeological congresses. He attended as a representative of the Riazan Archival Commission and a history professor from Sophia.
Linnichenko was that rare Ukrainian archeologist who eschewed separatism and even after 1917 maintained that Little Russia was a part of the larger Russian empire. He recognized their languages and cultures to be related, but not different. He also popularized archeology with articles in Kievskaia starina.
One of Russia’s foremost geologists, Inostrantsev worked with archeologists in making determinations about the Stone Age in Russia. As a student, he worked originally in chemistry under Dmitrii Mendeleev, but a passion for rocks displaced chemistry and in 1868 be began curating the newly founded Geological Cabinet at the Academy of Sciences. In 1869 he defended his dissertation on his geological research in northern Russia, where he had uncovered numerous skulls around Lake Ladoga, which he turned over to anthropologists, who overlapped with archeologists in the Stone Age in particular. With A. P. Bogdanov, Inostrantsev helped to found the Society of Lovers of Natural Science, Anthropology and Geography. Bogdanov’s foremost mentee and activist in the IMAO Dmitrii Anuchin discovered the bones of domesticated dogs at Ladoga and named them canis inostrantsev. Inostrantsev merits mention as an archeologist because of his work in helping to decipher the prehistory of civilization.
Alexandra Efimenko came to the profession by way of her husband Peter, though ultimately made more significant contributions than he. A native of Arkhangelsk Province, she met and married Peter there in 1870, where he had been exiled from Little Russia for nationalist-oriented activities related to his work as an ethnographer. They returned in 1874, first to Chernigov and then Kharkov; his poor health, and their five children, kept the family dependent upon her publications and lectures. Working extensively in archives, she focused on the evolution of economic and social structures of peasants in various parts of European Russia. Invited to St. Petersburg to teach Ukrainian history in Betstuzhev Female courses, 1907—1917, in 1910 Kharkov University awarded her an Honorary Doctorate of History; she was the first female recipient. Ironically, she was murdered by the Ukrainian nationalist Petliura Army in December 1918. One daughter became a Silver Age poet, and one son an important Soviet archeologist.
Boris Farmakovskii was one of Imperial Russia’s most respected archeologists of classical antiquity, best known for his work reconstructing Olvia in situ. He served briefly as the secretary of the Russian Institute in Constantinople, and on the Archeological Commission from 1901. From Simbirsk, his father worked for Vladimir Ulianov’s, and the two boys were acquainted. He also taught at the Higher Women’s Courses. After the Revolution, he was active in transforming the Imperial Archeological Commission into the Institute for the History of Material Culture, which he hoped would be removing the state from interfering in academic endeavors.
Being the nephew of a Decembrist did not impede Konstantin’s career; although he graduate from Moscow University with a law degree, he gravitated instead toward journalism and history, combining the two by editing the Russian and Slavic history section of A. A. Kraevskii’s “Encyclopedic Dictionary.” He made his intellectual mark with his magistrate, a textual analysis of the Russian chronicles, dating from the 14th century. His work made a methodological breakthrough in primary source analysis. Critiquing without criticizing the historians who had preceded him, he wrote new histories of Russia from his critical perspective of the sources. However, he is best remembered for the Institute of Higher Education for women, who were not allowed to matriculate in universities, that he directed from 1878. Thereafter the widespread practice of lecturing to women because known as “Bestuzhev courses,” even beyond his in St. Petersburg.