His father a celebrated painter and his mother the niece of prominent Slavophile Ivan Aksakov, Vladimir Konstantinovich became a numismatist and Orientalist, studying eastern languages, specializing in Arabic, at the Lazaervskii Institute. He held numerous positions of importance, the most important being custodian of the Armoury. At the IMAO, he held the post of secretary from 1888 and chair of the East Commission from 1911. He was also secretary of numerous Congresses, and sat on the organizing committee of all, beginning with the 7th in Iaroslavl, through the 16th in Pskov, which never came to pass.
Where Associated: Archive, Moscow Ministry of Foreign Affairs
A founding member of the IRAO, Savelev was one of Imperial Russia’s premier numismatists. An inattentive student in the classroom, he developed a love for coins that moved well beyond simply collecting them. His forte was Muslim coins, and he pioneered in analyzing them to chart historical movements and interactions. He published a survey even of Georgian antiquities in ZhMNP, vol. 16 (1837): 531-44.
His biographer recorded that his charitable works deflected his interest from his academic activities, and therefore he produced less than what could be expected from someone with his knowledge and capabilities, but one wonders what more could he have done? He began by studying church history under M. V. Nikolskii, and worked for the Synodal Typography while he also tutored the children of Prince Volkonskii. A member of several other societies, at the IMAO he served as secretary of the Eastern Secion. Then he edited the multi-volume publications coming from the 7th through the 11th archeological congresses. He presented numerous papers, several on inscriptions from Turkestan, although he does not appear to have traveled there himself.
An Orthodox Syrian, Murkos was one of only two Arabs to attain a professorship in Imperial Russia; educated first in Constantinople, he mastered Russian and become a Professor of Eastern Languages at the Lazarevskii Institute. He became politicized against Greek dominance of the Bulgarian Church, and also began to raise issues about the Koran; the Russian government toned him down, and he did well in academics, active in the eastern branch of the IMAO and translating an annotating his magnum opus, five volumes on as a translation and commentaries on travel account of the journey of patriarch of Antioch Makarius to the Moscow state (1652–1659).
The most important anthropologist in Imperial Russia, Anuchin provided the link between ethnography and archeology. A moderate Darwinist, and a translator of John Lubbock’s work, he never made that a credo of archeology, such as the latter did in London. Always extremely active in the congresses, he also edited the IMAO’s “Zapiski” in the 1890s. Although he never succeeded in professionalizing anthropology in Imperial Russia, today’s Institute in Moscow bears his name, as do a crater on the moon, a Kuril island, a glacier, and a mountain. For decades after Alexei Uvarov’s death he served as Praskovia’s righthand man.
Bartenev worked in the Moscow Archive of the Ministery of Foreign Affairs, and from 1863 he published the major journal “Russkii arkhiv.” He contributed to the Chertkov Library, the pfirst public one in Moscow, best known for its collection for Russian history. After 1905 he joined the monarchist political party, the Union of Russian People, best known for its anti-Semitic “Black Hundreds” groups.
Anfanasev was best known as a folklorist, a collector of Slavic tales. But he was also an archivist, and 1849-1862 he worked in the Moscow archive of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. For several years he was also on the Moscow City Duma.