Memory Eternal! The Eminent Russian Historian, S. O. Shmidt, Passes Away

On May 22, 2013, the eminent scholar and historian, SigurdOttovichShmidt, passed away. He was 92. His accomplishments and awards were numerous: Doctor of Historical Sciences, Academician of the Russian Academy of Education (of which he was a full member and founder), Counselor to the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Chairman Emeritus of the Archeographical Commission of the Russian Academy of Sciences (of which he was Chairman from 1968 to 2006), Professor Emeritus of the Russian State Humanities University (RGGU—he had taught at RGGU and at the Moscow State Institute for History and Archives since 1949), member of the Heraldry Council of the Chancellery of the Head of the Russian Imperial House (since 2003), was named a Meritorious Scholar of the Russian Federation (1989), was a Foreign Member of the Polish Academy of Sciences (1997), a laureate of the State Prize in Education (1999), of the Metropolitan Macarius Prize (2003), and of the prize “Triumph” (2009). Since 2006, Professor Shmidt had been a member of the Council for Cultural Policy, which advises the Speaker of the Federation Council of the Federal Assembly; and since 2008, he had been a member of the Public Council for the Humanities of the Committee on Science and Technology of the State Duma. Professor Shmidt was an honorary Chairman of the Russian Society of Local Studies, an organization he helped found in 1990.

Professor Shmidt was the author of more than 500 published scholarly works on Russian history in the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries, as well as works on general history, culture, source studies, historiography, local and regional history (including works on the history of Moscow—he was the editor-in-chief of various editions of the Encyclopedia of Moscow), archeology, archival studies, and much more. 

A brilliant teacher, Professor Shmidt presided since 1949 over his famous “Circle of Source Criticism” in the Moscow Institute of History and Archives, creating an entire school of specialists who worked not only on Russian history and source studies, but also on a whole range of ancillary historical disciplines, including genealogy, a field of study that had been largely discouraged by the Soviet academic establishment between the 1950s and 1980s.

As an authority on the political history of medieval Russia, Professor Shmidt was a specialist on the history and genealogy of its elite—the boyars and other courtier families. In his book The Formation of the Russian Autocracy: An Investigation of the Social and Political History of the Era of Ivan the Terrible [Stanovlenierossiiskogosamoderzhavstva: Issledovaniesotsial’no-politicheskoiistoriivremeniIvanaGroznogo] (1973), Professor Shmidtadvanced an entirely new conception of the system of Precedence (Mestnichestvo)—the unique institution by which the highest positions at court were assigned to members of the aristocracy according to one’s family’s past record of service to the Muscovite ruler. Professor Shmidt’s many and various works over the years on the history and culture of the aristocracy were collected in 2002 into a book entitled The Social Consciousness of the Russian Aristocracy from the 17th to the Beginning of the 19th Centuries [Obshchestvennoesamosoznanierossiiskogoblagorodnogososloviia XVII – pervaiatret’ XIX veka].

In 1990, Professor Shmidt, then a member of the Board of the Russian Cultural Foundation (then called the Soviet Cultural Foundation), expressed his support for the creation, under the auspices of the Foundation, of a Genealogy Council and agreed to serve as its chairman. In that same year, some of the most active members of the Genealogy Council helped to revive the Moscow Historical and Genealogical Society and to create the Union of the Descendants of the Russian Nobility—the Russian Nobility Association.

In 2002, the Heraldry Council of the Russian Imperial House was created, and Professor Shmidt was appointed an Advisor to it by a decree of the Head of the Russian Imperial House, H.I.H. Grand Duchess Maria of Russia, dated September 30, 2002.

On December 23, 2003, the Head of the Russian Imperial House and the Sovereign of the Russian Imperial and Royal Orders of Chivalry, H.I.H. Grand Duchess Maria of Russia, invested Professor Shmidt into the Imperial Order of St. Anna, Second Class.

Present at the funeral service in the chapel of the Central Clinical Hospital, which took place on May 24, 2013, was Dr. A. N. Zakatov, the Director of the Chancellery of the Russian Imperial House and one-time student of Professor Shmidt at the Moscow State Institute of History and Archives. The Head of the Russian Imperial House, H.I.H. Grand Duchess Maria of Russia, conveyed her deepest sympathies on the death of Professor S. O. Shmidt.