Fedor was more active in the local politics of the Mozhaisk district of Moscow Province where Porech’e, the family estate was located and where his parents had excavated earlier. His one publication was on a field of kurgans from the 4th-6th centuries, on the banks of the Oka, Riazan district; his parents seemed to have put him under Anuchin’s tutelage, but that did not hold. Praskovia wrote of taking their children with them on excavations, and his two sisters attended congresses. Fedor registered as a Cossack and served briefly, before retiring to Porech’e in 1891, where he was deeply involved in zemstvo politics. He was elected to the State Council in 1909, replacing D. N. Shipov, who had left politics. After 1917 he emigrated to Yugoslavia with his mother, but ended up in Nice, where his daughter Ekaterina married Prince Sergei Obolenskii, the cream of Russian nobility to the end.
Society: IMAO
Her biographies tend to emphasize that she had inspired Lev Tolstoi’s Kitty Shcherbatskaia in “Anna Karenina,” but play down her role as the most formidable female scientist in Imperial Russia. To be fair, she always subjugated herself to her husband, Alexei, even for the 30 years following his death in which she organized the congresses, published the essays from them, developed the Caucasus Museum, and fought to open locally based museums of antiquities throughout the empire. She excavated and published extensively, and her first love were the Christian artefacts in the Caucasus. Professionalism in Russian archeology is unimaginable without her.
An Orientalist and one of the first Russian archeologists to excavate in Samarkand and other points in Central Asia, Nikolai Ivanovich was one of the most productive and among the most familiar. In addition to Central Asia, he excavated in the Kuban region between the Black Sea and the Caucasus, and excavated the Maikop culture, a major find. He lectured at the Petersburg Archeological Institute, served on the IAK, and published widely. His best-known work was “Mosques of Central Asia” (1905).
Ivan Egorevich’s father died when he was 7, and the impoverished lad later very fortuitously found a job at the Moscow Armoury. Stroev and others there inspited his love for antiquity; he was always engaged in the professioanlization of archeology. His doctorate from St. Vladimir’s is honorary. D. I. Bagalei of Kharkov University named him the founder of “historical archeology.” He designated his daughter Maria and The Historical Museum as his only heirs, to receive his collections.
Ivan’s brother Andrei was a well known painter, and both specialized in their native province of Poltava. An amateur archeologist, Ivan excavated clay pots and other products at the same time that he was helping to revitalize such production in Poltava as the “king of kustar,” or “artisan products.” Involved in multiple aspects of the Poltava local government, he was especially active in ethnographic works and the museums. He arranged the Poltava display at the All-Russian Kustar Exhibition in 1901, and also presented on his archeological finds at regional conferences.
Trained in classical philology at St. Petersburg University, Sergei then took a position there, rising to the positions of Secretary of the Faculty, 1905-1909 and rector, 1911-1912. A specialist in Greece, he taught everything from its history to epigraphy. From 1894-1905 he taught ancient Greek art in the Academy of Arts. He also headed the classical section of the IRAO. He also translated and edited a number of classical Greek authors. After 1917 he remained and assumed a position of leadership at the former IAK, now the Institute of the History of Material Culture of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. He was a victim of the Siege of Leningrad during the Second World War.
Vasilii Zlatarskii embodies a political-archeological nexus that pits an acceptable nationalism against imperialism when the empire under assailment is the Ottoman. Son of a Bulgarian activist, Nikola Zlartarcheto, Vasilii was sent to Petersburg for his education, and then to Berlin to train in archeology. He returned to Sophia where he helped to turn the higher school into the university in 1904, and establishing a Bulgarian Academy of Sciences in 1911. An historian, he used archeology to establish a Bulgarian identity independent of the Ottoman Muslims, returning it, as it were, to its Slavic and Byzantine heritage. During the Great War, when Bulgaria allied with the Central Powers, he joined the troops in Macedonia for purposes of excavating. Widely published and respected, he was a member of the Russian Archaeological Institute in Constantinople, the Moscow Archaeological Society, the Finno-Ugric Commonwealth in Helsingfors, a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Czech Academy of Sciences and Arts, the School of Slavonic Studies at the University of London, and the Seminarium Kondakovianum in Prague. He also received an honorary degree in Slavic Philology from Kharkov University in 1907.
One of the original members of the IMAO, Tikhonravov met Alexei Uvarov in the 1850s, when he was on the Vladimir Statistical Committee and the provincial governor assigned him to work with the archeologist. Later, he excavated with Savelev in other districts of his native province. Tikhonravov never moved away from Vladimir, but used his position on the statistical committee to conduct and publish significant archeological information from the region.
Baron V. G. Tizengauzen, a Baltic German (Ernst Woldemar von Tiesenhausen), became an important Orientalist after years of petty bureaucratic jobs, necessary to earn his living. When the IAK was formed in 1859, he attained a clerkship there, and ultimately elevated himself to Associate Director, through his scholarship. The Commission dispatched him to excavate in New Russia and Crimea; he was also a numismatist. Although a member of IMAO from 1865, he resigned from it in 1889 over a dispute between Uvarova’s Society and Bobrinskii’s Commission over which one enjoyed propriety over the official assignation of permissions to excavate.
Count M. V. Tolstoi, educated as a physician at Moscow University, preferred instead the lectures he attended at the Moscow Spiritual Academy. Deciding that medicine did not fit his character, he evolved into an archeologist of Orthodoxy, and fittingly, he lies buried at the Troitse-Sergeeva Monastery. He was also deeply involved with local charities. His cousin, Dmitrii Tolstoi, was one of the most influential of the conservative statemen, serving as both Ober-prokurator of the Holy Synod and Minister of Education, 1865-1880, and then President of the Academy of Sciences.